Artist: Forgotten Eden
Label: Self-released
Release: 2008
Rating: 1.5/5
This is one of the toughest reviews I’ve ever had to write. Here come the cheerful lads from Veliko Ubeljsko (at the foot of Nanos), Forgotten Eden, now just Eden, with their first proper album in ten years of existence. These guys are seriously ambitious, because they’re tending a musical style that’s clinically dead today. Especially in Slovenia. Both stylistically and in the sound production itself. That is, melodic hard rock. It’s by no means “out of date&shape” if you manage to place your ideas in the right production outfit, but the other factors matter too, like richly layered vocal harmonies and the right pairing of lively colors in the dialogue between guitar riffs and keyboards. All three of these factors are far from polished to perfection on Eden. Melodic hard rock and AOR demand bombast, a bombastic production, and that’s seriously lacking on the album “Eden”.
The vocals are strong and convincing in the high to highest registers. The way the English lines are phrased is a bit clumsy, and in those spots the melody slips out of the music. It would be welcome if the band paid more attention to English in the future, in the sense of adapting and setting the lines at a higher level of singability. This phrasing clumsiness is felt especially in the middle to lower registers. Good thing we’re not dealing with Slovenian here, which the song Krompirjeva noč (the Slovenian version of Tonight Is The Night) only confirms. In the lower registers the voice even gets thin, which shows that the chosen tuning of the instruments doesn’t suit it all that well, so it would be wise to avoid that range as much as possible in the future, pick a higher register, or sweeten it up with harmonies.
The guitar riffs and the keyboards are both too distant in the production, too quiet, with no real bond between them and no coherent interplay, so they don’t form the kind of sonic space the vocals could settle into. Tonight Is The Night is the song that shows this flaw most clearly, with Girl In Love and It’s My Love hot on its heels, the latter of which you can already find on the album “Forgotten Eden”. Because of this “quiet” production of the riffs (Attention! Eden have two guitars!!!), at certain points on the album you can get the feeling you’ve popped an old, unreleased Pop Design album into the CD player, re-sung in English, or some new reincarnation of Rendez Vous. With no sonic fullness between the riffs and the keyboards in the background, the vocals at times stick out far too harshly, especially when they go for guttural screaming. That can even come across as annoying, which is a shame given the high-quality characteristics they otherwise reach.
The choruses of Straight, I Can’t Wait, Nightfalls, The End and Electric Night carry some nice potential that the hand of a proper production could surely have shaped into something far more impressive and expressive. The basic concept of these songs is impressive too, and the guys definitely don’t hide their musical virtues and talent. Despite some snarky criticisms, the guitar soloing shines throughout the album, never pretentious, instead keeping the songs fluid and melodic. As it stands, though, the shallow production leaves the album without proper dynamics and variety. The sound feels one-dimensional and the album as a whole very “behind the times”. Imagine what would happen if Deep Purple ever tried to measure up to Journey, or just remember how lost and out of their element Blackmore’s Rainbow were when they dabbled in AOR tricks in the eighties.
Overall the thing is definitely a qualitative step up from “Forgotten Eden”, which I honestly can’t decide about, whether it’s an EP or a real studio album (check the running time!). Despite the fresh new ideas the guys are offering, the album “Eden” still gapes with quite a few holes, and the band will have to use a lot of homespun yarn in the future to patch them up. First things first, the guitar riffs need to be pushed much further forward, given a modern keyboard sound, the vocals enriched with a proper palette of multi-voice harmonies, the archaic use of synthesizers shaken off, and the English singing upgraded.
Regardless of this write-up, Eden are a Slovenian musical reality, they’re a real band, they’re representatives of hard rock. The guys certainly don’t lack courage, since they’re tackling a genre where everything has been sung, everything said, everything discovered, and where Slovenia never had much of a tradition or continuity. Let’s just say that Eden, together with bands like Mary Rose, Seventh Angel, Rock Shock, Stone Orange, Black Diamond, etc… are only now barely shaping it on today’s scene. An important figure in Slovenia in that respect. There’s no doubt these guys will upgrade the album “Eden” with its successors in the future. Metal in Slovenia is currently expanding like crazy, and hard rock follows it with a delay, but keeps stubbornly on its tail.
Lineup
Jure Počkaj – vocals, guitar
Edo Sabljaković – guitar
Iztok Kocen (Jimmy) – keyboards
Nejc Počkaj – bass guitar, backing vocals
Miha Nedoh – drums
Production
Jadran Ogrin & Eden
Tracklist
1. 1998
2. Straight
3. i Can’t Wait
4. Nightfalls
5. Tonight Is The Night
6. Electric Night
7. It’s My Love
8. Girl And Love
9. Final
10. The End
11. Krompirjeva noč*
*…bonus track
