Artist: Ten
Label: Frontiers Records
Release: 2006
Rating: 2/5
Singer Gary Hughes and the rest of the Ten “gang” have rolled up their sleeves and pushed out their new album, titled “The Twilight Chronicles”. According to Gary, it’s the biggest achievement of their career and their most ambitious work to date. It’s the band’s eighth studio album! And well, there clearly wasn’t much of a genre or style departure from “Return To Evermore”. The new album sounds softer and will please those of you who swear by the band’s early days, and less so the rest of you who lean more toward, say, their album “Spellbound”.
There was talk of an ambitious album, even the MOST ambitious! That means a set-up concept that’s supposed to carry us back to the days of ancient Rome. So? The intro is phenomenal, with orchestral arrangements building a mighty atmosphere right from the very start. Then, shortly before the four-minute mark, the album unexpectedly kicks in with a great guitar riff and Ten wake up! It’s all here. Hughes’ unmistakable vocals, a great, clear production that creates contrast between the front line – riffs, vocals, keyboards – and the rhythm section. Chris Francis’ lead guitar is also worked into the form of the song really nicely in the solos. So the first track is classic Ten, with the band’s familiar tricks, upgraded by the work of a symphonic orchestra. The peaks of the track are the dramatic main guitar riff and the chorus itself.
Interestingly, the atmosphere on The Chronicles stays at a similar level, the band sticks to tried-and-tested forms, with a softer, riff-driven orientation and touches of the sound of “Return To Evermore”, and Ten keep persisting with it through The Elysian Fields. And well, this is where it starts to go wrong! The track is a bit too long and its repetitiveness gets more annoying with every minute. As if that weren’t nightmare enough, the next track opens with the exact same motif. We’re talking about the 10-minute “EP” Hallowed Ground, and this move strips the record of most of its credibility. You can figure out pretty quickly that Hallowed Ground is basically The Elysian Fields, whose ballad-like feel with dominant keyboards has this time been rebuilt into a guitar-riff form that unfolds over the song’s mid-tempo pace. Of course the musicians played everything brilliantly, but the flaw mentioned is too severe not to be distracting. Ten also lose their footing because of the repetitive motifs in the track yet again. The song tips over into an almost 11-minute adventure that could easily have run its course in a good seven minutes, since right after the seventh minute that same nasty motif gets set up all over again. Apparently Ten wanted to tie the different acts of the concept together this way. Twilight Masquerade, Torniquet and Oblivinon, which follow, could all be excellent picks for a “hit single”, and you’d definitely want to trim and prune them down to 4 minutes, but otherwise these tracks are a truly polished combination of mid-tempo melodic hard rock, with smooth flow between the song’s structures and dramatic peaks in the choruses. It’s only the melodically predictable motifs that keep coming back too many times.
The concept has lost its purpose and failed to conjure the intended atmosphere. The songs are stretched out far too much. Running times that sprawling are something bands with a more experimental pedigree can afford, from power metallers like Virgin Steele and Blind Guardian to progressive metal acts like Seventh Wonder or Symphony X, but such a concept simply didn’t work out in the hands of the melodic “hard rockers” Ten. The album has reached epic proportions, but only in length, and otherwise it’s decidedly too long, by at least 25 minutes. On top of that, even the cover art has no particular connection to the concept. It would fit better on the latest Iron Maiden studio album, the one pondering the purpose of life and death. The album is good, it’s not shattering, it’s not virtuosic and sadly it doesn’t convince. It’s just good. Fans of the band will be happy with it anyway, but I’d suggest the guys stick to shorter structures in the future and try to bring selected concepts to life through those. They could also lean on broader orchestral, symphonic passages, leaving a bare melody played only by the orchestra free to flow. Even that trick alone would have saved them from their own repetitiveness on “The Twilight Chronicles”.
Line-up
Gary Hughes – vocals
John Haliwell – guitar
Chris Francis – guitar, bass guitar
Paul Hodson – keyboards
Frank Basile – drums
Production
Gary Hughes
Track list
1. The Prologue; Rome
2. The Chronicles
3. Elysian Fields
4. Hallowed Ground
5. This Heart Goes On
6. Oblivion
7. The Twilight Masquerade
8. Tourniquet
9. Born To The Grave
10. When This Night Is Done; Epilogue
Album length: 73.43
