Review Summary: What would have been an OK album, is bogged down with obvious filler.
To look at Night Castle, and see that it has twenty six songs, is kind of intimidating. In a time when most albums have ten to fifteen songs on them, to try and pull through this album may seem like it would be a challenge. Although, if you can sit through the weak intro. You may just find a couple diamonds among the coals.
Starting your album off with two blatant fillers, is never a good thing. But that’s the route taken by Night Castle, opening with the gag worthy 'Night Enchanted'. Then, they top it off by following it with the largely unsatisfying and boring 'Childhood Dreams'. Nothing interesting happens in these two songs and they should not be on the album.
Thankfully they pick up the slack and manage to pull through with 'Sparks' & 'The Mountain', these are both two solid rockers, that give the album a large dose of life, the Orchestra manages to keep up the ante with 'Mozart And Memories', an instrumental that opens with a, violin; then quickly shifts to pounding drums, and guitar riffs, this is probably the best song on the album.
Unfortunately, the worst part of the entire C-D is the vocals. The lyrics can be cringe worthy at times, and the vocalists voice feels out of place at best. Which ends up bringing down most songs, if they had an adequate singer than this would improve the album tenfold. This is most relevant on 'Another Way You Can Die', which would have been just as good as the excellent 'Toccata – Carpimus Noctem' had there been no singing at all. The vocals do eventually somewhat pick up towards the end of disk one, but by then you will have already written it off as just noise.
In conclusion; if you were to remove all of the filler tracks, take out all the painful vocals (or in that case replace the singer), shorten some overkilled tracks. Then you would have, if not the most cohesive collection of songs, a very average album.
Recommended Tracks
The Mountain
Mozart And Memories
Tocata – Carpimus Noctem
