Style: Traditional prog metal (clean vocals)
Review by: Nick
Country: Germany
Release date: 24 June, 2022
Look man, nobody wants to be the one to say that 15 years worth of writing added up to a pile of trash. Maybe that’s why the reviews for this album have been so absurdly positive. Or maybe the traditional prog metal sound has stagnated to the extent that this really is some of the best the genre has to offer, but either way somebody’s gonna have to come right out and say that this album is a hardcore miss.
The genesis (heh) of Philosophobia begins 15 years ago when two friends, Andreas Ballnus and Alex Landenburg, worked up some rough demos. They parted ways into various credible acts only to get back together 13 years later to work on this album with Kristoffer Gildenlöw, Tobias Weißgerber, and Domenik Papaemmanouil. So while this album continued production in 2020, the bulk of it was apparently written in 2007.
This can come across as a cool fun fact, but as someone who browsed prog archives religiously in high school and has listened to countless Dream Theater clones from around that time, let me just say that having prog written in that time period does not automatically equate to being good. There was a particular fad going on around back then that was just “Do what Dream Theater does”. Some fantastic albums came out of this fad such as Seventh Wonder’s The Great Escape, Circus Maximus’s Isolate, and even Haken’s Aquarius; but there were also massive clunkers. Then you have the middle ground between the two extremes, a middle ground inhabited by bands like Dreamscape and Mind’s Eye, bands that are decent enough for a cursory listen but are nothing you’d ever come back to.
This context is important because Philosophobia’s self-titled is 100% a 2007 style Dream Theater rip-off. I don’t even mean that as an insult, it just is a Dream Theater rip-off. The most egregious moment occurs in “Thirteen Years of Silence” at the time of 1:59 which almost identically mimics 1:13 in “Erotomania”. It mimics the sound, but with much looser playing, sloppy drum beats, and annoying repetition. And then bizarrely, it goes from that moment to basically being an entirely different song after a bit of silence. I can see what they were going for, but my god did they not pull it off. I actually laughed when I first heard it because I thought it was an entirely different song.
Aside from the consistently sloppy playing, the singing is also extremely weak. He has a great voice, he just doesn’t use it to his advantage. Honestly, none of them use their talents to their advantage at all. The riffs, the songwriting, the lyrics, everything about this album feels computer generated. I’m sure the production is doing this album a great disservice, but it’s hard to imagine someone sitting up at night tweaking the lyrics to get them just right or to be pulling their hair out over perfecting riffs. It really feels like some vague demos from 2007 and not the polished, meticulously crafted work we’ve come to expect from modern prog bands.
Is this album really that bad? No, not really. Is it boring as all hell and just a bunch of generic cliches and bland tropes scotch-taped into the form of an album? Absolutely. Had this been released in 2007 it would have faded into the noise of similar acts to middling reviews, but instead it’s getting 9/10s and 10/10s. This feels like a testament to the current state of the traditional prog metal scene and, as someone who grew up with Dream Theater/Queensryche/so on, that just bums me out. Here’s hoping they do better if they make another album, which I hope they do. They’ve got insane potential, they just haven’t tapped it properly yet.
Recommended tracks: Thorn In Your Pride
Recommended for fans of: Dream Theater, Queensryche, Headspace, Threshold
You may also like: Redshift, Mind’s Eye, Soul Secret
Final verdict: 2/10
Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Facebook | Metal-Archives page
Label: Sensory Records – Bandcamp | Website
Philosophobia is:
Domenic Papaemmanouil (vocals)
Andreas Ballnus (guitars)
Kristoffer Gildenlöw (bass)
Alex Landenburg (drums)
Tobias Weißgerber (keyboards)
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