Tuesday, March 29, 2016

DIVIDED MULTITUDE: ”Divided Multitude”

Rating: RRRr
Label: Fireball Records 2015
Review by Kimmo Toivonen

Last year, Divided Multitude celebrated their 20th anniversary and this self-titled album is their 6th. My first contact with the band was in 2013 when I got my hands on their previous album ”Feed On Your Misery” which was a decent effort. The same goes for this one.

The band’s progressive metal covers many bases. I could imagine that fans of In Flames could find something to their liking here, Dream Theater fans too… and ”Only For You” has a definite old-school Yngwie vibe all over it. Not to mention the strong Queensrÿche-influence on ”Proud”… they even go for a more Power Metallic approach on couple of songs - for example ”Demise”, which reminds me a little bit of Sonata Arctica.

I like the fact that although the band’s music is fairly technical, the songs are still compact and approachable. There aren’t many extended solos or instrumental passages. Only the closing track ”Seal Of Faith” wanders into the epic direction, but it’s only 9 minutes long - a short ditty by prog metal standards!

Vocalist Sindre Antonsen still sings like he's hanging on the edge, but somehow I can tolerate it better this time around. He's certainly a very passionate singer! Extra mention goes to Eskild Kloften's atmospheric keyboard work.

This is definitely the better of the two DM albums I’ve heard, and pretty close to a four-R rating. If one or two of the songs would have stood out a bit more, I wouldn’t have hesitated… Hell, while I don’t normally mess around with the ratings, let’s throw in a small ”r” this time - this deserves a better rating than the previous one of theirs.


https://www.facebook.com/DividedMultitude/

No comments:

Post a Comment