Artist: Factory of Dreams
Label: Progrock Records
Release: 2008
Rating: 1/5
Factory Of Dreams is a duo project made up of Portuguese multi-instrumentalist Hugo Flores and singer Jessica Lehto. The album “Poles” is supposedly progressive metal, but with every listen it stays deep in the red, or put another way, it’s a letdown.
Ever heard an album where the songs feel like someone threw in a little bit of everything? Absolutely everything? An album that gives you the feeling of a headless chicken? All the musical know-how, all the manual dexterity, all the sky-high vocal firepower and whatever else is on the menu has to be put above all else, with the muscles flexed past every limit until they snap right off the bone.
It’s a mush built on a synthetic base of programmed drums and sampled sound loops with added sub-rhythms, over which supersonic riff-slicing weaves its way, crossed with acoustics and jittery “look what I can do” solos, all cranked up to the very edge of annoying by an operatic gothic vocal whose sinusoidal, shrill curves quite literally tear at your ears. We’re talking about total incompatibility of both motifs and sound among the individual building blocks of this album.
The motifs have nothing to do with each other. Just as one gets going, an illogical pause of psychedelic “sound loop” filler cuts it off, and the next moment Jessica’s operatic shriek can fry your brain. Without the vocals, the whole thing might have worked much more effectively and convincingly in a strictly instrumental light, as the longer instrumental stretches in songs like Electric Boom or The Piano In The Sea prove.
Operatic vocals have a really hard time working in metal unless you wrap them in gothic arrangements and give the songs a compact structure, with a clear backbone built on a sequence of pre-choruses and choruses. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more fragmented, lifeless and empty album than “Poles”, where forced synthetic playing and forced singing clearly dominate over feeling and a healthy musical idea. How sad it is to realize that the CD is only good as a “frisbee”.
Lineup
Jessica Lehto – vocals, vocal arrangements
Hugo Flores – electric guitar, acoustic guitar, bass guitar, synthesizers, drum arrangements, drum samples, percussion
Production
Hugo Flores
Track list
01. Transmission Fails
02. The Sight Of A Better Universe
03. Air Powerplant
04. Factory Of Dreams
05. Gliding Above The Ocean Of Memories
06. Peace Echoing
07. Stream Of Evil
08. The Piano In The Sea
09. Generator Of Illusions
10. Electric Boom
11. Crossing The Bridge To The Positive Pole
Album length: 47.06
