Style: Progressive Metal, Power Metal (Clean vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Myrath, Symphony X, Angra
Review by: Dave
Country: Germany
Release date: 29 March 2024
A sense of place is crucial when evoking prosody in music. Symphony of Enchanted Lands would have been much more bland had it not evoked the feeling of riding a dragon over lush green hills, and Darkspace’s moniker would be virtually meaningless if they didn’t embody overwhelming dread in an incomprehensibly vast and empty space. So what happens when power/prog veterans Ivory Tower completely forgo their experience in spacey settings to explore a new location?
Ivory Tower have been at it for a long time, gracing us with heavy-hitting space power metal as early as the late 90s in the style of a more raw predecessor to Pagan’s Mind or a Damnation Game-era Symphony X minus the Symphony, accompanied by spectacularly cheesy album covers like 2000’s Beyond the Stars, with its space chess pieces that weave through meteors crashing into a distant planet. Over the years, their songwriting style has remained fairly consistent, using energetic chugs to advance verses and making room for the vocals to soar over the choruses, exploring this sound even up to 2019’s Stronger. Heavy Rain, however, represents a change of setting, Ivory Tower leaving their well-tread late 90s space power metal sensibilities for a dreary desert setting with accompanying AI album art and a more modern and straightforward sound akin to recent Myrath output.
Unfortunately, what Heavy Rain is unable to do that Myrath’s Karma does accomplish is execute this style in an interesting way. Virtually every song here retains a mid-paced clip with chugging guitars that adhere to a relatively narrow tonal range while new vocalist Francis Soto reliably sticks to a gruff timbre. Like the desolate monochrome desert depicted on the album art, the sonic palette of Heavy Rain is limited in a way that makes the experience as a whole bland and unenjoyable. Acoustic guitars make their presence known on occasion, but they serve more as an intro to tracks that are quickly obscured by a sandstorm of mid-paced, down-tuned chugs. While the catchiness of a song like “The Tear” etches marks into the earth that leave an impression, the presentation on tracks such as “Monster,” “Holy War,” and “Black Rain” is quickly smoothed away into dunes by the desert wind.
However, even in the middle of a featureless desert, there is still beauty to be found. The one saving grace on Heavy Rain is the vocals: despite sitting in a relatively similar range across the runtime, the vocal performance provides an overwhelming majority of the moments of interest. Soto’s timbre and delivery is perfect for this style of metal, his gruff style adding a sense of power to the music. The instrumentals in the opening verse of “The Destination” award space to Soto’s catchy vocal pattern to create one of the more engaging moments here. “The Tear” includes moments that let both the vocals and the instrumentation shine, including a chorus that uses interesting yet subtle vocal effects to add drama and intensity, along with a fun bridge where the vocals interplay excellently with the guitar work, showing promise that Ivory Tower can make this style work.
Nothing on Heavy Rain is offensive. It reads as a transitional album more than anything, showing that Ivory Tower are unafraid to explore new ideas, but execute them in a way that comes off as inexperienced in this style. I won’t count them out just yet, especially given the promise of a good modern power/prog style with the addition of Francis Soto’s vocals, but the desolate and monochromatic sensibilities incorporated into a genre that relies on energy and color results in an an album that I am not interested in revisiting again. I’ll just look at pictures of the desert instead.
Recommended tracks: The Tear, The Destination
You may also like: Anubis Gate, Pagan’s Mind, Jack the Joker
Final verdict: 5.5/10
Related links: Spotify | Facebook | Instagram | RateYourMusic | Metal-Archives
Label: Massacre Records – Facebook | Official Website
Ivory Tower is:
– Thorsten Thrunke (drums)
– Sven Böge (guitars)
– Björn Bombach (bass)
– Frank Fasold (keyboards)
– Francis Soto (vocals)
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