Artist: Elis
Label: Napalm Records
Release: 2009
Duration: 48:56
Rating: 3/5
Elis are basically the best that the pocket-sized kingdom of Liechtenstein has to offer in metal! Right now, mind you. The band has been through a rough patch over the past three years, one that put its very survival in question, but thanks to the strong will of one of its two founders, Peter Streit, they decided to stick it out in the music business. The other pillar of the band since day one, singer Sabine Dünser, tragically passed away in July 2006 while recording “Griefshire”. Sabine didn’t just have a superb voice. She wrote the whole concept for “Griefshire”, so her presence in Elis mattered creatively, in the band’s development, and not just in delivering the music to the masses.
The gap has now been filled by Austrian singer Sandra Schleret from Innsbruck, who also sings in Siegfried and Dreams Of Sanity, and this is her first Elis album. The new record hits the marks you’d expect from the gothic metal mold, and I can say without mincing words that it’s a good, strong studio album. But for a halfway fair verdict, you have to put it up against what Sabine Dünser brought to the previous three Elis albums. Sadly, Sandra doesn’t have that flawless, virginal, angelic cherry on top in the color of her voice that defined Sabine Dünser’s signature sound. The band also no longer uses three-part vocal harmonies in the choruses (they’re cut down to a bare minimum), and those gave Elis a special, recognizable energy. What you get more and more instead is the male “growl croaking” combo, which pretty much every gothic metal band does these days (Morning Star).
From the very beginning, Elis belonged to the gothic metal bands that bet on metal punch, at the cost of skipping the cosmetic touch of orchestral, symphonic arrangements. Instead, the new album again uses a curtain of synths in the background with a predictable sound, just like a horde of similar bands. So the power metal side is what stands out most in Elis’ sound. Especially in the evenly matched riff-and-solo interplay of the two guitarists. It’s the same this time. It’s exactly the lower charisma of the new female vocals that can’t hide the formulaic power metal riffs, which occasionally get dressed up with Helloween-flavored harmonies (fast picking over the riffs). So something more is missing, something to lift the dynamics and variety of the record and make it more interesting within those predictable genre boundaries. Elis have no prominent or distinctive orchestral arrangements like, say, Leave’s Eyes, and they can’t pull off the high melodic catchiness of Delain either, who are true masters at crafting perfectly exploited melodic chorus hooks.
All in all, the new album doesn’t mean a step forward for Elis. “Griefshire” (2006) remains the better album. “Catharsis” also showed what Sabine Dünser actually meant to this band. “Catharsis” can’t break free from the cliché predictability of stuff we’ve already heard, and sadly Elis don’t offer even a pinch of their own identity, or a touch of something distinctively theirs, even if it were just a routine production trick. The guitars are, admittedly, wound up to a wrecking-ball crunch in the production, the solos are classic power metal with plenty of partial back-and-forth dialogues, the songs peak in the chorus hooks, wrap up nicely melodically, and never lose the thread, and the rhythmic foundation is often precisely “counted off” with double bass drum pedals. So the album doesn’t lack metal drive. It’s just too predictable and a bit watered down in character. On the other hand, “Catharsis” is an enormously important album for Elis, because with it the band proved it can keep functioning, that it can exist, and that it has found a reason to carry on. I believe “Catharsis” is really about feeling out the range of the new Elis, a new state of affairs, newly established chemistry. The next album will be the one that gives the real answer on whether the band can get away from the uneasy brooding in the shadow of the predictable gothic power metal mold and get past its current identity crisis. A solid album, then, one that let the band survive a crisis moment in its career, though Elis gave up a bit of charisma along the way. Half a point up for the courage to defy the odds at a critical moment in their career, which brings this album to a total of three points!
Line-up
Sandra Schleret – vocals
Pete Streit – guitar
Chris Gruber – guitar
Tom Saxer – bass guitar, vocals
Max Naescher – drums
GUEST MUSICIANS:
Michelle Darkness – vocals on track no. 3
Production
Alexander Krull
Track list
01. Core Of Life
02. Twinkling Shadow
03. Warrior’s Tale
04. Des Lebens Traum, des Traumes Leben
05. I Come Undone
06. Firefly
07. Morning Star
08. Das kleine Ungeheuer
09. Mother’s Fire
10. Rainbow
11. The Dark Bridge
