Artist: Mind's Eye
Label: Lion Records
Release: 2007
Mind’s Eye are also adding their new opus to this year’s musical map. Quite a few excellent progressive metal albums have already come out this year, and Mind’s Eye, with their conceptual new record, only confirm that the center of gravity of progressive metal has shifted to the Scandinavian countries. “A Gentleman’s Hurricane” is in all likelihood the most important Mind’s Eye album of their career. With it, the guys have built a proper drama of tragic downfall, and they’ve brought it to life with their musical chops so convincingly in the studio that it translated straight onto tape.
Mind’s Eye are only three members strong, but each of them is a polished, fully-formed musician with a superb feel for melody, technique at their fingertips, and a precise idea of what the studio offers for musical expression. The band’s boss is a multi-instrumentalist, fundamentally a drummer and a big Genesis fan (just listen to the intro of Red Winter Sirens, before the first riff attack): the brilliant Daniel Flores, who’s known for working with countless names, in all sorts of projects, as a special guest, sound engineer or producer. He’s the author of most of the musical ideas in Mind’s Eye, and “A Gentleman’s Eye” is largely his musical baby.
The band’s basic aim was, of course, to make an album different from its predecessor “Walking On H2O” (2006). That’s perfectly logical, but the question is how many bands actually manage to pull it off. With “A Gentleman’s Hurricane” we have a record that’s a completely new story for Mind’s Eye.
The guys first picked a concept and hung the basic musical ideas on it, which then grew radically in the studio and got built up further. The main character of the concept is a killer who wants to lighten his heart and cleanse his soul, to shake off the pain, because the burden he lives with won’t let him sleep in peace. He takes refuge in a remote church, where he befriends the local priest. The priest thus becomes witness to horrifying stories during the sinner’s confession: he killed on the orders of the order of the enlightened (The Illuminatti), so he’s got important political and church dignitaries on his conscience. But this is where the real story only begins. Our killer has one more important job ahead of him, but let’s save a little dessert for later, shall we?
Mind’s Eye have created a truly doom-laden atmosphere to go with the story. The album opens with an instrumental prelude where Gothic choral madrigals take the central role at first, instantly sketching the ice-cold church walls, just as ice-cold, yet brilliant, is the mind of the main character. The intro swells in mood through orchestral arrangements, topped off by the first verses from Andreas Novak, in the role of the protagonist’s confession. The basic choral motif plays an important part later, returning as an integral piece of Red Winter Sirens, which, by the way, is one of the album’s most complex tracks and also the moment where the concept cracks and the plot thickens to the max. It’s certainly a very pathetic concept at its core, that is, if you subtract the music.
With Seven Days we get what we came for. The album takes off here, and we fly with it right to the end. The musicians’ skills are masterfully fused into a progressively complex fold-out map commanded by a melodic, hugely singable chorus that grabs the listener’s attention in an instant. The rhythmically fractured pre-chorus of this track, set up right at the start of the album, tells you there’s a very serious piece of musical art in front of you.
“Walking On H2O” was a much brighter Mind’s Eye album as far as atmosphere goes. It was marked by flirting with hard rock and even more so with AOR heritage. Here, the dark atmosphere that “A Gentleman’s Hurricane” is saturated with simply won’t allow that. What we have is a typical progressive metal album. The compositions are built far more intricately than on “Walking On H2O”, and the same goes for the flowing shifts of mood that create the extremely dynamic undulation of “A Gentleman’s Hurricane”. This is an album you have to gnaw on for a good while. That the element of unpredictability and spontaneity is emphasized on it hardly needs mentioning. Singer Andreas Novak has tremendous charisma, a pinch of Russell Allen (Symphony X). It’s a voice that would feel right at home if it were put in the role of performing a hard rock song. But you can squeeze more than that out of Novak, since he has a remarkable knack for slipping into the role of the central character of the chosen concept. The vocals effortlessly bring the sinner’s most intimate personal testimony to life, and in the case of this concept, his confession. Daniel Flores, the main architect of the “progressive” side of Mind’s Eye, knew this all too well. On top of that, Flores contributed a superb rhythmic fold-out of his great drum-bashing skills that keeps the listener constantly on edge and rewards them with lots and lots of music, with which he dressed the guitar riffs in piercing melodrama through the keyboard arrangements he created. Of course, the main cog that drives the Mind’s Eye machinery is, as usual, the guitar riff of Johan Niemann. It’s the foundation of Mind’s Eye’s music, and all the other building blocks attach to it. They’re calibrated for ideal coexistence. In all its manifestations, Mind’s Eye’s music is absolutely subordinate to the guidelines of classical orchestration. The atmosphere is solemn, yet it carries a piercingly cold touch, through which everything shines except the soothing of the sinner’s mind, in the sense that he’s unable to forgive himself his sins. The gnawing of his conscience, which relentlessly chips away at his sound mind, is merciless.
The individual tracks are, as already mentioned, built far more intricately than on previous Mind’s Eye releases. That’s just the overture to this paragraph, because on “A Gentleman’s Hurricane” the band managed to maximally highlight the complexly structured design of the songs themselves, which the schizophrenic concept gives special weight, while the guys at the same time kept the choruses absolutely singable, in short a high degree of melodicism and compactness in the crafted motifs, which the very design of the choruses unmistakably expresses. Mind’s Eye are masterful tightrope walkers here, easily holding the middle line that can’t throw them off balance or topple the creation of an ideal equilibrium between the compositions and the living atmosphere, which effectively shake hands throughout and reinforce each other across the album. That’s why “A Gentleman’s Hurricane” can be called a critical album in Mind’s Eye’s musical career.
The concept was essential for this, since it’s really not hard for Mind’s Eye, with a few progressive stunts, boldly built up and combined with the vocals, to create a pinpoint feeling that paints the schizophrenia of the concept’s main character. With “A Gentleman’s Hurricane”, Mind’s Eye have delivered to the market a very demanding album for the listener in the field of progressive metal, namely in combining compositional complexity, simultaneously creating a black atmosphere and implementing it all with compact melodicism. Whatever is left or right of this album and was released in 2007 is either more melodic and simpler (take Symphony X, Circus Maximus, Darkwater) or more complex and therefore prone to fragmentation, motif crumbling and less logical, motif-wise compact cohesion between the songs themselves (the Dream Theater syndrome). Mind’s Eye found the ideal balance here and ride the middle line the whole way. They’ve offered an album that’s definitely unrepeatable, and thus unique, since it can effectively exist only alongside the chosen concept. And this time that’s exactly the whole point. Fans will be blasted into seventh heaven by a masterpiece that grows on your heart through repeated listens, and they’ll be especially thrilled when they spot a DVD in the package alongside the CD,which takes them through the making of “A Gentleman’s Hurricane” and an animated comic.
Line-up
Andreas Novak – vocals
Johan Niemann – guitar, bass guitar
Daniel Flores – drums, keyboards, backing vocals
GUEST MUSICIANS:
Mia Coldheart – vocals on track no. 8
Rolf Pilotti – recorder & flute on track no. 11, backing vocals on tracks no. 9, 10, 12 & 13
Doyle McGraw – bagpipes on track no. 11
Johannes Lindstroem – backing vocals on track no. 1
David Risberg – backing vocals on track no. 1
Production
Daniel Flores
Tracklist
1. Praying For Confession
2. Seven Days
3. AssassiNation
4. Chaos Unleashed
5. Hell’s Invitiation
6. Feed My Revolver
7. Ashes To Ashes (In Land Lullaby)
8. The Hour Of Need
9. Red Winter Sirens
10. Skin Crawl
11. Graveyard Hands
12. Say Goodnight
13. Pandora’s Musical Box
Running time: 74.38
