Label: Frontiers 2021
Review by: Urban "Wally" Wallstrom
Phantom Elite is a relatively new metal band fronted by singer Marina La Torraca (Exit Eden, live vocalist for Avantasia) and features songwriting and production by former After Forever guitarist and producer Sander Gommans. Marina and Sander together with Max van Esch (guitars) and Joeri Warmerdam (drums) unleash an slice of contemporary sounding heavy metal music on their sophomore album "Titanium". Sonically, the band combine symphonic, progressive and heavy metal.
The keyboard player is clearly a prime factor, yet not a proper member of the band though? However, my hat off to Koen Stam as he's contributing to the albums' overall sound with some truly impressive work on the ivorys. It's a relatively lean and stark production, and the style itself is dark and more energetic, immediate and powerful, favouring mostly really aggressive power riffing and mid-song lengths, fast and snappy tempo changes, quirkiness and strong vocals by Marina. It's all resulting in a pretty darn decent, at times even captivating or fascinating second album with more diversity than are often given credit for in this particular genre. The male growls on "Worst Of Me" is however rather typical for the genre and it's far from the most original sounding anthem as of lately.
According to the band and I quote, "Listeners can expect songs where modern meets symphonic and progressive, (very!) heavy riffs meet epic melodies, all overloaded with a wide spectrum of emotions and love for music. For sure, a high note in our careers!", end quote. Indeed. Check out the heavy bombardment of "Glass Crown" where you simply can't resist to shout along to the refrain and the words of 'Wash away, the spell of the night. Lost in haze after midnight'. Intrestingly Phantom Elite have made a few short experimential trips outside the usual "goth" female fronted format and the monster metal title track of "Titanium" clocks in at +seven minutes and should have any metal fan grasping for air. Just to keep it balanced that are some straight ahead goth moments on the following numbers of "Bravado" and "Silver Living". The latter sounding like The Alyson Avenue fronted Nightwish. Final Verdict: They deal in powerhouse vocals and chunky riffing where the stacatto rapid fire guitaring provides a seriously pattern for destruction. Wicked! Phantom Elite at Facebook
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