Style: Progressive Metal, Symphonic Metal, Rock Opera (mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Ayreon, Symphony X, Seven Spires, Textures
Country: California, USA (with multinational guests)
Release date: 5 July, 2024
Few individuals have become embedded in popular legend to quite the extent of Johann Georg Faust. An itinerant alchemist and/or conman who wandered across Germany in the early 1500s, even contemporary accounts of his escapades offer little in the way of distinction between fact and fiction, and the man’s own grandiose claims of having signed a pact with the Devil didn’t help. Suffice it to say that he was a figure ready-made for tall tales, and after said tales inspired both Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Goethe’s magnum opus Faust, his legacy has been cemented in the cultural lexicon; to this day a “Faustian bargain” is well-known shorthand for selling one’s soul to a sinister figure. It’s honestly surprising that such devilishly occult subject matter hasn’t been made into a concept album by more metal bands already (I guess Randy Newman got to it first), but Isle of the Cross, helmed by songwriter Je Schneider, are here to fill this void with their musical adaptation of Marlowe’s version of the tale. We shall see whether this album will listen to the better angels of its nature or if its fate is to be damned to Hell’s fires.
I’ll be perfectly honest: I first picked this album largely because I thought it would be bad, that it would give me an entertainingly terrible train wreck to gawk at, and this largely stemmed from some rough first impressions. The spoken-word “Prologue” starts with two spoken word narrators quoting lines straight from Marlowe’s play over ominous orchestration, one of whom (Amrit Sandhu as The Narrator) sounds smooth and professional, whereas Daniel de Jongh’s Faustus, well… doesn’t. We’ll get to him in a bit, but for now let’s address the subsequent track and instrumental scene-setter “Wittenberg, 1587”, which takes all the right ingredients of a big, bombastic symphonic metal opener and leaves them strangely underbaked. I imagine Schneider listened to Symphony X‘s “Oculus Ex Inferni” from a badly scratched CD, and after hearing the abrupt skips from measure to measure, marveled at how “progressive” the time signatures were before vowing to replicate that exact approach in his own work. Seriously, this track feels like its odd meters were crafted by cutting out pieces of a 4/4 riff in Audacity after the fact, and the end result feels amateurish and unfinished.
After that, we finally have our first proper track with “Metaphysics of Magicians,” and… okay, we have to talk about de Jongh’s performance as Faustus. For whatever reason, he delivers a significant portion of his parts on the album in a weird, sung-spoken cadence, with a tone that I can only describe as “constipated hobgoblin”. Since de Jongh is a talented, veteran vocalist who has repeatedly demonstrated his abilities in Textures and elsewhere, I can only blame Schneider’s direction for this one; maybe he really wanted Faustus to come across as a twisted, corrupt weirdo in parts and told him to convey that in his voice, maybe at some point he said “sell his soul” over a Zoom call and de Jongh misheard it as “yelling troll”; who knows. The point is, his odd pseudo-rapping singlehandedly brings down otherwise-strong songs like “Ghost at the Feast”, and even his clean singing sounds uncharacteristically strained in places, such as the chorus to “The Divine Apostate”. Of course, he does pull off a few genuinely powerful performances when he drops the goblin act, but those moments are rarer than they should be. It’s a clear example of theatricality outweighing what is pleasant to listen to, and it’s easily the album’s biggest sticking point.
Yet, once you get past those weird vocal parts and a few more awkwardly-constructed odd meter riffs (the intro to “Blood Oath” needed another pass or two), Isle of the Cross display a surprising amount of genuinely good musical ideas. I mentioned “Ghost at the Feast” as being well-performed outside of the Faustus bits, and indeed, it boasts a killer interplay between intricate harpsichord lines and crunchy riffs that feels straight out of the Symphony X playbook. Speaking of riffs, the guitars here are handled by Eric Gilette (Neal Morse, TEMIC), and he’s in fine form as usual, pulling off numerous deliciously shreddy solos that elevate the material a great deal; I especially enjoyed the shamelessly self-indulgent solo trading between him and Schneider’s virtuosic keyboards in mid-album instrumental “Dragons Astralis”. His tone is satisfactorily thick-sounding throughout, though I could have done with a bit more bass presence in the mix to make the riffs hit harder.
As for the rest of the cast, they generally perform their roles quite well; Angela di Vincenzo of Secret Rule portrays Helen with a smooth, sensual verve that, alongside Diane Lee’s Good Angel, makes the radio-ready melodic metal of “Immortal Kiss” an enjoyable listen. Charles Elliott (Abysmal Dawn) lends his suitably cavernous, inhuman-sounding growls to the role of Lucifer, while Matthieu Romarin portrays Mephistopheles with soft, sinister singing as he tempts Faustus, contrasted with growls that reveal his demonic nature. While Faustus’ servant Wagner and his comic relief sidekicks have been cut, there is still (unintentional) comedy on display here, largely from the cast’s attempts at spoken word. Except for Sandhu as the Narrator, none of these people are professional voice actors, and thus multiple line reads feel a bit… silly. Highlights include Faustus’ inexplicably Cockney delivery of “Oi wanna see a LOT more!” in “The Divine Apostate”, and “The Coven of Wittenberg”, in which Mephistopheles says “Faustus… strengthen thy nards” (It’s apparently supposed to be “strengthen thine art”, but that’s not how he says it.)
Yet, despite all this, Faustus: The Musical does a surprisingly good job of reckoning with the themes of its source material in a serious, thought-provoking manner. This version of Faustus, when he’s not being a weird gremlin of a man, is defined by his aching desire to find meaning from God that He refuses to provide. In “Hourglass”, Faustus laments how God sits on His throne in silence as men are damned; he frames the desire for salvation as a tragic “unrequited love” that forced him to seek answers in Mephistopheles instead. It’s a powerfully moving ballad, led by a great vocal performance from de Jongh that clearly shows what he can do when he isn’t sidetracked by awkward attempts at character acting. A similarly powerful moment occurs at the album’s climax, “Eleven’s Hour”, where Faustus repeatedly reaches his hands out to God in one final desperate prayer but is left with silence as Lucifer drags him to Hell, and the delivery of the last chorus never fails to send shivers up my spine.
On the whole, Faustus is a creation as brilliant yet deeply flawed as its titular character, delivering displays of stunning mastery and head-scratching incompetence in near-equal measure. Yet I believe, unlike Faustus, Isle of the Cross can find redemption. The pieces of an absolute knockout of a record are here, and if Schneider and his collaborators can figure out how to assemble them properly, their next opus has the potential to be something worth selling one’s soul for.
Recommended tracks: Immortal Kiss, Hourglass, Dragons Astralis, Eleven’s Hour
You may also like: CrowsVsRavens, Aeternam
Final verdict: 6/10
Related links: Spotify | Official Website | Facebook | Instagram | Metal-Archives page
Label: Rockshots Records – Facebook | Official Website
Isle of the Cross is:
– Je Schneider (songwriting, keyboards, production, voice of Evil Angel and Friars)
– Eric Gillette (guitars)
– Daniel de Jongh (voice of Faustus)
– Diane Lee (voice of Good Angel)
– Charles Elliott (voice of Lucifer)
– Matthieu Romarin (voice of Mephistopheles)
– Angela di Vincenzo (voice of Helen)
– Amrit Sandhu (voice of Narrator)
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