Artist: Juvaliant
Label: Limb Music Records
Release: 2010
Rating: 4/5
Juvaliant, who call Salzburg, Austria home, are symphonic progressive metallers with prominent power metal elements. No human ear, however deaf and/or totally at war with music, could miss that or hide it. The band formed in 2003 under the name Fallen Angel, founded by ex-Edenbridge guitarist Robert Schönleitner and drummer Sebastian Lanser, and later renamed themselves Juvaliant. The band is international, too. The quintet is made up of three Austrian musicians, with the lineup filled out by Slovenian Sašo Gačnik (keyboards) and Croatian Aleksandar Vasić (bass). Think of bands like (first and foremost) Symphony X, but also Scandinavian melodic prog metal acts à la Circus Maximus, Vindictiv, Seventh Wonder, and even Italy’s Rhapsody Of Fire (the song Doomsday Machine) comes into play. If you like those bands, there’s no need to read this review any further, because you need to check out “Inhuman Nature” right now.
The band isn’t offering a musical revolution, so “Inhuman Nature” is an album that will rally under its banner all of you who are devoted fans of symphonic progressive metal. But of the kind that sticks to a red thread, where the compositions have a head and a tail. The injection of ultra-pomp is clearly front and center, and the band pulls it off through the bombast of the symphonic keyboard arrangements. An approach inherited from Symphony X in that respect. I’d single out some parts of the closing mini epic suite Cold Distance Of The Universe in particular, which even revives the statement of Symphony X’s 2000 album “V – The New Mithology Suite”. It’s also the peak of the album “Inhuman Nature”, which convinces in every way that you don’t want to mess with the quality of Juvaliant’s musical vocabulary. These guys know exactly what they’re doing, they know what they want, and they pull it off effectively with a high degree of musical know-how. Cold Distance Of The Universe is a suite that holds exceptional motif variety all the way through, while keeping things compact within that variety, plus an ultra-melodic catchiness that makes for highly listenable music. So you can already conclude for yourselves that the rest of the album’s songs are even easier to get into. In this closing mini epic the band also managed to catch a touch of unpredictability, which teases the listener even more and deepens the drama-theater element of this part of the album. A truly beautiful composition in every respect.
The production follows a typical sound-image setup. A dominant, clean, clear, and authoritative vocal with a wide range, which successfully reaches even the highest vocal sequences, is placed front and center. The delivery and timbre of the voice add an extra dose of pomp and melodicism to the band’s musical artistry, which is actually an expected requirement in this genre. The guitar riffs hug the vocal closely, handle the drama theater and metallic doom, and cut like a sharp razor. Solos? Absolutely. A school-book approach laced with fast, precise finger-racing up and down the guitar neck in the instrumental middle sections and/or the passages in between that tie together the motif variety of the songs.
The dramatic climax is deepened by excellent keyboard arrangements, which play the role of a real symphonic orchestra and stand right next to the guitars as full equals, one of the key foundations without which the musical path the band follows would be unthinkable. The element of symphonic grandeur that the keyboards bring is of course also familiar from bands fronted by female singers (Within Temptation, Delain, etc…).
Juvaliant don’t know the meaning of musical fragmentation. A fine example is the cross-trading of solo duels, with guitar solos and keyboards shared back and forth in the middle of the song Silent Agony, where the band prioritizes staying compact and melodically accessible.
Want Vivaldi run through a distortion effect with operatic vocals? Check out “Inhuman Nature”. But as I said, “Inhuman Nature” doesn’t bring a revolution of new artistry. It will, however, please all fans of symphonic, epic-leaning metal with a prominent element of progressive rhetoric. Closest to the Scandinavian approach and, of course, to the musical foundations of Symphony X. At the same time, Juvaliant are one of the better metal acts to come out of the climate of our northern neighbor Austria (for Austria certainly a high point of metal music) and, in that respect, have a really nice shot at breaking through on the international scene.
Lineup
Thomas Strübler – vocals
Robert Schönleitner – guitar
Sašo Gačnik – keyboards
Aleksandar Vesić – bass
Sebastian Lanser – drums
Production
Jan Vacik & Juvaliant
Tracklist
1. Into The Abyss
2. Heroes (We Will Be)
3. Doomsday Machine
4. Live To Die
5. Hell’s Roundabout
6. Killing Child
7. On Wings Of Steel
8. Silent Agony
9. Cold Distance Of The Universe
