Label: AFM Records
Release date: 7. 10. 2022
Production: Sean Dowell
Album length: 62.25 min
Genre: Progressive Metal / Power Metal
Rating: 8.0/10
Borealis, a relatively young Canadian progressive and power metal outfit from Orangeville (Ontario) who have been at it since 2005, have been especially busy lately. After a good decade of grinding away in the underground, a very successful joint tour with Evergrey, Oceans Of Slumber and Voyager, and above all their previous album »The Offering« (2018), finally brought them the attention of a wider music audience.
With an AFM Records deal in their pocket, the band now drops its sixth studio album »Illusions«, the second part of an ambitious concept story about a cult that sacrifices children to worship its deity. The band decided on this fairly out of the blue and with no real master plan: frontman, vocalist and guitarist Matt Marinelli, a big fan of horror movies, watched one and started thinking the band should tackle a similar concept. After all, with this kind of subject matter you can draw plenty of parallels with the achievements of today’s human ‘civilization’, which has turned into more of a CRYvilization than anything else.
With gritty defiance, the band has won itself a crew of loyal followers, and that’s fully deserved, because Borealis are a top-quality quartet that grows naturally and keeps pushing the artistry of their musical vision to a higher creative level. With every album. They have a dark, atmospheric touch in a thoroughly modern, bristling production that can occasionally recall the aforementioned Evergrey, and when it comes to the hyper-infectious musicality they build into their songs, Borealis should also win over anyone who’s into melodic metal in the vein of Pyramaze, or even Kamelot. Every Symphony X fan should check them out too.
By nature, »Illusions« is quite similar to its predecessor »The Offering«. It develops in a similar way. The band again picked through the best of the best and sweated every detail. It has a seriously gripping opening stretch, led by the strikingly bombastic Ashes To The Rain followed by My Fortress. After that pompous opening, the album calms down again a bit too early with the balladic lament Burning Tears. The overall feeling of this ambitiously conceived work is still a little thankless: there are simply too many songs, and the arsenal of highly musical feats loses some of its color as the album goes on. From there the record picks up again, especially with Light Of The Sun and then Face Of Reality. For the closing section of this concept album, the band saved its most committed composition to date, called The Phantom Silence. A varied, melancholic and dark progressive metal symphony stuffed with typical bombast and a seriously gripping chorus melody, it proves to be a very fitting closer.
Borealis are excellent musicians. The guitar solos are a chapter of their own, and the mood swings within the ‘mid-eight’ passages are especially fun to listen to. Arrangement-wise, too, Borealis forge a solid synthesis of keyboards and gleaming guitar phrasing, which results in a gripping, massive wall of sound that commands the songs. After the sudden departure of original keyboardist Sean Werlick, the experienced Vikram Shankar, otherwise a member of the American progressive metal ‘tightrope walkers’ Redemption, jumped in at the last minute to save the day. The top-notch, bristling pomp driven by the album’s dynamic flow is crowned by Matt Marinelli’s deeply felt, passionate, authoritative and highly musical vocals. As a rule, then, everything on the new Borealis album sits right where it should. This is a band that’s clearly on an artistic rise, and with this kind of commitment, they’ll surely deliver plenty more quality records in the future!
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Track list:
1. Illusions (1:22)
2. Ashes Turn To Rain (4:54)
3. My Fortress (7:12)
4. Pray For Water (5:26)
5. Burning Tears (4:20)
6. Believer (5:32)
7. Light Of The Sun (6:24)
8. Face Of Reality (5:47)
9. Bury Me Alive (5:07)
10. Abandon All Hope (5:06)
11. The Phantom Silence (11:15)
Lineup:
Matt Marinelli – vocals, guitar
Ken Fobert – guitar
Trevor McBride – bass guitar
Sean Dowell – drums
Guest musicians:
Linsey Ward – female vocals on track no. 5
Vikram Shankar – keyboards, synthesizers
