Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Poverty's No Crime
Label: Metalville Records
Release: 2016
Length: 56:59
Rating: 3.5/5
Nine years of waiting! Nine long years. German progressive metal standouts Poverty’s No Crime are known today only to true fans of everything that smells of progressive metal and/or progressive rock. Given their lengthy creative break, it’s an open question who (in Slovenia) even still remembers them.
Anyway. »Spiral of Fear« is the band’s most mature and compositionally defined album to date, if not downright flawless. Simply because it took a very long time to come together. The recording alone dragged on for almost two years. The band holds on to its recognizable melancholic stance on the album, especially thanks to the vocal quirks of singer and guitarist Volker Walsemann, who was never a poster boy for technical brilliance, but whose tone of voice and approach count as one of the band’s key trademarks.
Poverty’s No Crime have always been a band that, guided by innate intuition, deftly walked the fine middle line between arrangement complexity and musical catchiness, all while cultivating their own recognizable sound. This time around it’s not much different. Compact riff structures, topped with melodic listenability, or catchiness if you like, dominate or outweigh the complex parts and passages at every point of the album. Even when the band cuts loose and stretches out in longer instrumental passages, they never stray into a »sickly« slavery to a sea of textbook-played note runs and the resulting fraying of motifs and song structures. Poverty’s No Crime just don’t do that. That’s why »Spiral of Fear« stays very accessible throughout, both for demanding musical ears and for those who are happy with »simplicity«.
The new album’s sound is only slightly softer than the band’s earlier work, which fans of sharpened-up guitars won’t be too thrilled about. That comes down to the structure of the songs themselves and, of course, artistic maturing. Everybody would have survived, brain intact, without the song »Ballad of ’91«, which softens the album even further and would have left us with a shorter record if cut. The material on »Spiral of Fear« automatically »pushes« its way into your ear, even though it has all the levers of prog-metal songwriting. So it settles in fairly fast. After two or three spins in the CD player. That’s an observation we’ve already made about previous Poverty’s No Crime albums, except that the new one doesn’t have a single song memorable enough to be radio-friendly. Even though the band has found its own stylistic and sonic niche that nobody comes close to, you can still look for stylistic and sonic parallels on the new album, both with American bands (Fates Warning, Dream Theater) and European ones (Vanden Plas).
As Prešeren’s famous verse goes: »I hoped long and feared long, bid farewell to hope, to fear; the heart is empty, not happy, back to hope and fear it longs to go.«, Poverty’s No Crime were thinking along similar lines with this album’s messages. Music is a lever that helps you escape, at least for a while, from the fears and hopes we »torment« ourselves with in real life. At least for a while. May fear vanish for good, even if hope lives on forever. Let’s say that’s more or less what the band was thinking too.
Poverty’s No Crime – The Longest Day:
Lineup
Volker Walsemann – vocals, guitar
Marco Ahrens – guitar
Jörg Springub – keyboards
Heiko Spaarmann – bass guitar
Andreas Tegeler – drums
Production
Poverty’s No Crime & Simone Mularoni
Tracklist
1. The Longest Day
2. Spiral Of Fear
3. Fatamorgana
4. A Serious Dream
5. The Fifth Element
6. The Ballad Of ’91
7. Dying Hopes
8. Wounded
