Customer Reviews

Lemuria

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

With operatic voicing, slammmin' guitars & bass and backed by a symphonic orchestra, _Lemuria_ starts off as a great Therion album. Shortly, however, death-metal style 'cookie-monster' vomiting into the mike cut in and destroyed a few songs. I'm not a big fan of 'Cookie-Monster' vocals: I don't see the attraction of the style. An old buddy of mine with a music degree loves the heavy, harsh tonal growls: in his opinion, guttural death-metal style vocals are closer to 'pure music' (e.g. lacking verbal content) than main-stream singing. I certainly see his point, and I definitely prefer it to auto-tuned 'singing', but it's "just not my bag, baby." If guttural "throat singing" is 'your thing,' then this album will be just fine for you. Not every song is ruin't; however, so it's entirely reasonable to give the songs a listen & pick and choose. I find that Therion albums lose some of their magic if you don't listen to them in a linear fashion, but that in no way detracts from the excellence of individual songs.

Therion's musical style has changed drastically over the enterprise's ('band' doesn't really seem to signify when discussing Therion) many continuous decades of music creation. As a result, Therion fans enjoy diverse tastes and few love/hate the entire catalogue equally. To identify weather or not this review will help you: I love _Deggial_, _Secret_of_the_Runes_, _Vovin_, and _Theli_. I absolutely adore their cover of ABBA's "Summernight City". Good songs do exist on this album: "Lemuria", "Quetzalquatal", and "An Arrow from the Sun" are worthy pieces. However, death-metal style vocals eat into a few songs, and even w/o that particular detraction, the album as a whole doesn't compare to Therion's better works: _Secret_of_the_Runes_, _Vovin_, _Deggial_, and _Theli_. _Lemuria_ is pretty good operatic metal, but certainly is not an awesome Therion album. If you like Therion, you'll find enough here to please you; although, given a choice you should investigate other Therion albums prior to settling for this one.

I'm not displeased with this album.

Overall it tends to sound like basic metal to me with a slight goth tinge like Lana Coil, but it has a mixture of death, "gothish", and opera style vocals. This band also has two vocalist, male and female like Lacuna Coil. Both of them switch back and forth within songs like Lacuna Coil also. That's where the coil similarity ends, because this band is heavier, darker, and more unique. Both handle the "gothish" and opera parts, while he does a couple of fleeting deathish style vocal lines, which is good imo, because I wouldn't like it if it was all cookie monster vocals. Inbetween time they handle some basic vocals. The album gets a 4 stars for being unique, along with having good musical ability, and a solid fillerless album. I took off 1 star because I don't like cookie monster vocals, even though they were fleeting. Of course that's my taste.

This album is yet another typical Therion album, different to the others yet the same old sound, which is not to be critical at all, personally I don't love Therion except for the Vovin album, yet I can't resist buying every album, as there is something about their unique sound. The tracks on this album that stand out for me are Lemuria, The dreams of sweden borg ,An arrow from the sun and Feuer overture. This is yet another consistant product from the band, if you like Therion you will like this.