Label: Reaper Enterainment
Release date: June 25, 2021
Production: Grega Smola Crnkovič
Album length: 56.58 min
Genre: Heavy Metal
Rating: 9.5/10
SkyEye are a one-of-a-kind phenomenon. These Ljubljana heavy metal revivalists blazed onto the scene like a comet three years ago with their studio debut “Digital God” (2018, RockLine review). The album was received brilliantly, and the band kept winning over the metal community thanks to some killer live shows too. Word about the fresh, up-and-coming outfit didn’t go unnoticed by foreign labels either, and so the guys moved under the wing of Reaper Entertainment, where they put out their second studio album, “Soldiers of Light”, toward the end of this July.
On the new album the band has managed to carve out and highlight the traits that make its musical character even more tangible and even more real. Sure, it’s clear that SkyEye once again owe a debt of inspiration to bands from the N.W.O.B.H.M. days, with Iron Maiden at the helm. And yet. They stir up those associations just right. They tease with 40-year-old metal archaisms in just the right dose, and these never come across as deliberately borrowed or copied. Inside the compositions they work like a masterfully packaged ingredient that gives the album’s content a powerful flavor. Which means that, through all of this, SkyEye definitely have a character all their own.
SkyEye aren’t bringing a musical revolution, but they are very convincing at what they do. They don’t lack diligence or commitment, nor creative fire and heart. You can feel it everywhere on the new album. The new record is a bit trimmed down in running time compared with the almost overly lavish debut, though it still clocks in at a solid 57 minutes. And it brings a nice crop of variety and dynamics. Two intros and eight proper tracks, two of them mini symphonic epics. The first part of the album is packed with hefty, anthemic assault tracks. The album catapults skyward as SkyEye line up red-hot wreckers one after another: King of The Skes, Soldiers of Light and Constellation. These three practically compete over which will steal the spotlight. Mostly thanks to their extremely distinctive chorus melodies. Among them, the chorus in Constellation could be declared an especially inspired one. Leščanec lays down an especially pompous and infectious vocal melody on this track, one that is contrastingly “weighed down” in the production by the furious torpedoing of the double bass drum, driven in the manner of the achievements of (Teutonic) German heavy metal. An incredibly successful composition when it comes to finding the optimal blend of punchy sharpness, theatrical drama and under-the-skin seductive musicality, all caught in one place. The song reaches one of the album’s most powerful atmospheric crescendos, and does so in a truly excellent chorus from vocalist Jan Leščanec.
The album has two longer compositions. The first sits in the middle and is called Brothers Under the Same Sun. It’s a superb epic symphony that never feels stretched out for even a moment, instead unfolding dynamically through a series of dramatic upheavals, guided by skillful compositional tightrope-walking in which several different leading motifs join hands, woven together in a constantly harmonious, reconciling dialogue. At the tail end of the album we find its longest composition. The ghost town of Pripyat, which became one in the Soviet Union era. The town was abandoned in 1986 after the Chernobyl disaster, the worst nuclear reactor accident in history. The band set this sad story to music in the epic Chernobyl. It’s the most ambitious composition SkyEye have tackled on the album. It’s also an exceptional vocal challenge for Jan Leščanec, who once again very convincingly shows off the many faces of a well-developed vocal theater. Given that the band builds up a nice crop of complexity, SkyEye wisely placed this track at the very end of the album.
The band clearly enjoyed making the new album. In sound, the record comes across as extremely compact and cohesive. Production-wise, the contrasts in the sonic picture are sharply emphasized, with the dominant vocals front and center, which, alongside distinctly clean, melodic and authoritatively confident singing, also deftly trades in maneuvers of aggressive growling. You can clearly feel on the album that the quintet breathes for one another, and that the guys read and support each other brilliantly when it comes to ideas. Even though the distinctive and endlessly inventive riffs work in a revivalist fashion, SkyEye prove on the new album as well that they have an exceptional sense for achieving the right flow and dynamics and for building moods within individual tracks. On the new album they’ve taken another step up in maturity in this skill. The transitions are slipped in with great finesse, and what’s especially impressive is the band’s resourcefulness in moments when they need to go, say, from a “mid-eight” passage back into the chorus (or pre-chorus), with SkyEye sacrificing not a speck of their punch, theatrical drama and musical flow (the way Constellation plays out springs to mind again). The album is full of perfectionist detailing, of sweating the finer points, which in the Slovenian music scene is more the exception than the rule. A perfectionism we’ve had trouble remembering, with the likes of Eruption and Paragon, since the days of the debut by Bay Area thrash metal revivalists Negligence.
The band knows how to serve up a larger dose of aggression too, which the second part of the album brings in particular, with the dark, doomy, mocking and “devastating” Son of God, followed by Detonate, in which a well-developed bite and nastiness ride a wrecking maneuver of Judas Priest phrasing, while the vocal melodies give the track milder associations even with early moments of old-school American speed metal (led by the likes of Helstar). The penultimate track on the album, Eternal Starlight, is a mid-tempo number with elements of a powerful ballad, and in the verse Jan, thanks to the melody, conjures up some of the charisma of early Queensryche.
With the new album, the hugely ambitious “Soldiers Of Light”, SkyEye have pulled off an achievement they can be immensely proud of, and one that absolutely must come to life on concert stages as soon as possible! The very distribution of the new album shows that SkyEye are ripe for an assault on the international scene, since you can find it in the store catalogs of labels such as Nuclear Blast Records and Napalm Records, among others. Given the level of artistic maturing they’ve shown, their unsuspected talent, and their sheer drive and diligence, SkyEye can reach even higher on their evolutionary path. It wouldn’t be any surprise if they ended up moving under the wing of an even bigger label. SkyEye are a band full of potential, one to keep a very close eye on. But they mustn’t doze off. They need to keep striking the iron right away. While it’s hot and glowing.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Tracklist:
1. The Arrival (02:02)
2. King of the Skies (03:49)
3. Soldiers of Light (03:45)
4. Constellation (05:10)
5. Brothers Under the Same Sun (09:50)
6. In Saecula Saeculorum (01:15)
7. Son of God (06:09)
8. Detonate (04:53)
9. Eternal Starlight (05:26)
10. Chernobyl (14:28)
Lineup:
Jan Leščanec – vocals
Grega Stalowsky – guitar
Marko Kavčnik – guitar
Primož Lovšin – bass guitar
Jurij Nograšek – drums
Guest musician:
Matic Leščanec – keyboards
