Style: symphonic metal, progressive metal, hard rock (clean vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Avantasia, Ayreon, Devin Townsend, Savatage, musicals, Disney music
Review by: Sam
Country: Sweden
Release date: 27 August, 2023
Picture this for a second: you are 12 years old and on holiday in Florida going to the one good thing in the state: Disneyland. The seemingly endless queue at the gates could not stifle your excitement and the boundless energy extracted from savagely devouring copious amounts of cotton candy, and now Mickey Mouse is approaching you to tell you all about this wonderful place of unbridled capitalism hopes and dreams. This is what it feels like listening to Ledmotiv, well, except for the fact that this is supposed to be in space.
As if it were a Disney musical, sickeningly sweet orchestration and grandiose, theatrical vocals set the stage as you enter Ledmotiv’s world. You can almost see the fairies twirling their wands filling the air with twinkling residues as “Prologue” reaches its crescendo with triumphant literally everything: orchestra, guitars, drumming, vocals. The level of camp puts even Rhapsody to shame, but it’s done with enough sincerity to win me over. An Astronaut’s Diary is an effort to dwarf even the American food industry in terms of sugar forced upon its customers.
Beyond its introduction, “The Man in Silver” and in “Master of Simulation” kick things off with a bang. Ledmotiv’s metal sound is very 80s, taking primarily from hard rock like AC/DC, but spicing it up with classic heavy metal and power metal touches (mostly in the solos), and of course, progressive metal. Riffs aren’t generally the focus of this band, but these two tracks both have a very catchy, upbeat main riff, and the guitarwork is generally great when it isn’t playing second fiddle to the orchestra, showing some remarkable solos (see: “No Return, No Recovery” and “Acclimatization” especially) and lead melodies. Most of the time though, the orchestra takes up the space that normally a guitar would fill, leaving not much room for the guitarist beyond mirroring or filling out the lower end. The orchestra integration is what I find most impressive about An Astronaut’s Diary. The band synchronizes exceptionally well with them, flexing their prog metal credentials as they pull off technically challenging passages with ease.
Difficulties soon arise however. Most notably the mixing is headache inducing, overdoing on reverb and gain on the lower end, muffling the drum sound to painful degrees. There is no room to breathe despite the album having plenty of calmer passages, which at a sixty-four minutes runtime, is a problem. Ledmotiv also fall victim to their own ambitions from time to time. The straightforward tracks are mostly fine compositionally, but the longer tracks lost me in over-complicated arrangements and labyrinthine song constructions, most notably on “Acclimatization” which squanders its initial momentum within three minutes and “A Thousand Narrators” which does exactly as it says and it’s a claustrophobia-inducing mess.
Where the band really falls short however is in the vocal department. Singer Fredrik Vahlgren goes for maximum theatricality at all times and completely overdoes it in most passages, constantly going for an overdramatized rock vibrato even when a gentler melodic approach is more appropriate. Messiah Marcolin can get away with too much vibrato in Candlemass because they put his vocals center stage, but Ledmotiv cram their music like an overstuffed sandwich you can hardly take a bite out of without sauce and ingredients spilling everywhere. Occasionally he does write a memorable vocal line, but it’s smudged between so much nonsense, and is so similar in delivery to his other, less memorable lines that it disintegrates from memory soon after anyway.
An Astronaut’s Diary is a prime example of the saying that less is more. I appreciate Ledmotiv’s effort to pull all the stops in order to make this record, but next time I hope for them to keep things simpler, and maybe most importantly, to hire a better mixing engineer. For all its bombast and initial excitement I had for this record, awfully little of it has stuck with me, and usually I adore greasy sonic dairy products! There is certainly a vision, but now I pray they can find the execution as well.
Recommended tracks: Prologue, The Man in Silver, Master of Simulation
You may also like: Maestrick, Scardust, Gandalf’s Fist, Flaming Row (bandcamp)
Final verdict: 5.5/10
Related links: Spotify | Facebook | Instagram | Metal-Archives page
Label: Independent
Ledmotiv is:
– Fredrik Vahlgren (vocals)
– Nils Leufvenius (guitars)
– Viktor Envall (drums)
– Miguel Chamorro (violin)
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