Review Summary: Honestly, in some ways, Mute Prophet is more faithful to symphonic power metal and Finnish melodeath than even the bands that created the genres have been in recent years.
I remember seeing a Facebook ad with clips from one of St. Louis, Missouri-based Mute Prophet's music videos, and it described their music as a blend of Nightwish, Children of Bodom, Epica and Arch Enemy. Considering three out of four of those bands are my favorites, I was intrigued and decided to check them out, and I absolutely fell in love with what I found. Honestly, in my opinion they're one of the most refreshing and unique symphonic metal bands in a long while, and I'm amazed that they haven't gotten bigger than they are yet. From what I understand, they only have three members (two guitarists and a vocalist) and they record or program the rest of the instruments themselves and use backing tracks to play live, which is kinda cool but maybe has something to do with why they're still so small.
What I noticed very quickly with this band is that the guitars are a defining feature. Don't get me wrong, the orchestral arrangements are massive and the vocalist is very talented, but the guitar work is something completely new to symphonic metal. All the riffs are extremely technical, it's very rare that guitarists Kevin Goetz and Chris Tompkins are content to chug power chords. Instead, they favor very "mobile," fast-fingered riffs, as well as weird or unusual chords that used to be common in Arch Enemy and Children of Bodom riffs. Also, in almost every song, they "trade" solos back and forth, like Alexi and Janne from CoB.
"Limits of Myself" kicks off the album with a bouncy, Bodom-esque guitar riff set against strings, horns and piano, immediately into a solo with some incredibly fast sweep picking, and then we get our first taste of the vocals, and this is where I was really finding myself hooked. Frontwoman Adrienne Odenthal performs both growling/screaming and clean vocals herself, instead of the typical "clean female vocals, growled male vocals" approach of most major symphonic metal bands. So she kicks things off with some Angela Gossow-esque harsh vocals, straight into some Floor Jansen-esque cleans, before the intro riff comes back for the chorus.
I don't want to give a paragraph-long writeup of every song, obviously, but I do want to mention what I found to be the highlights of each. "As You Fall" starts off extremely heavy, with an infectiously catchy chorus, but tapers off into a softer interlude halfway through, before again exploding into crazy solos. The intro of "For the Blind" is absolutely massive with its orchestration, and after the second chorus, it transitions into this really melodic eight-finger tapping on a clean tone, where the vocalist demonstrates that she can also handle opera quite beautifully. "The Bridges You Burn" is just overall really damn catchy, and the vocalist hits some high notes that are up there with Simone Simons. "Choke on the Smog" starts off with some of the most intimidating sweep picking I've ever heard, followed by a couple of really deep growling sections (the latter of which features an orchestration that sounds like a dungeon theme from an RPG), into a chorus where the vocalist sings with kind of a rasp or snarl. There's also a part with a bunch of overdubbed vocal harmonies that just sound really eerie and ominous. "Theurgy" is unique for having a growled chorus, another eight-finger tapped clean section where the vocalist just sounds absolutely heartbroken, and some very soulful outro solos. "To Be Gone" is the obligatory ballad, and is largely carried by sad vocals, though the chorus riff is still surprisingly intricate. "Ardor of the Flood" features a harmonized shred over the pre-chorus, and on the second chorus, the vocalist switches back to the pissed-off, melodic snarling from Choke on the Smog. The song's outro is an INSANELY heavy riff, possibly the heaviest one on the album, which explodes into...
"The Unheard Warning." This 10-minute beast is the second-longest on the album (that's right, I said SECOND-longest), opening with almost black-metal tremolo picking into a growled verse with some really weird chords. This song makes its way through a lot of different moods, and is definitely one of the best things on the album. There's also, interestingly, some lyrics featured in the pre-chorus in a language that I don't recognize, which the band has hinted on Facebook has some kind of tie-in to an overall story or concept behind the album. At one point the title track also recaps or references lyrical snippets from previous songs, which is cool.
Then, after a nice outro solo, we get "Comprehension," which clocks in at just over 11 minutes. This is one that I almost don't even want to try to describe, because I truly consider it something that just needs to be heard. There's just such cathartic emotion in it. The ending actually references the chorus from "Limits of Myself," and it closes the album out with one of the most moving orchestral arrangements I've ever heard.
Something I haven't had a chance to mention yet is that the band produced this hour-long debut album themselves, but it actually sounds pretty damn good. Sure, it would be better if they could record a legit orchestra like Nightwish, but for three 20-something-year-olds with nothing but a computer, I gotta say I'm impressed.
Honestly, in some ways, Mute Prophet is more faithful to symphonic power metal and Finnish melodeath than even the bands that created the genres have been in recent years. Personally, I felt like the most recent Nightwish, Arch Enemy and Bodom albums had lost a lot of what made the bands great 10-15 years ago, and when I got targeted by that fateful Facebook ad, what I found was a hyper-modern yet somehow nostalgic tribute to Scandinavia's best albums of the past two decades.
