Boy, does this band have a great guitar sound.
Big, thick, and richly nuanced, they occupy a space somewhere between the mindless heaviosity of metal and the pseudo-intellectual grandeur of prog rock.
Tom Englund's voice is similarly flexible, moving from a guttural roar one moment to an operatic, chesty bellow the next.
Tilting things a bit to the prog rock side is the fact that this is a concept album, a song cycle based on the story of a person who is lured into a religious cult, stripped of his personality and self-respect, and then rejected and left alone again.
The songs are tied together by a thread of spoken word sermonizing by a voice that represents the cult's leader.
While it's not always clear to what degree Evergrey are criticizing mindless fanaticism and to what degree they're simply ridiculing religious belief of any kind ("Led to believe in a truth that was false/Truth builds on greed and the faith of the weak...Stupid of me to believe in your hypocrisy"), this isn't a mean-spirited album.
There's a gentle, almost tender beauty to several of these songs, and the others build to the kind of big, cathartic climax that fans of Queensrÿche will likely find irresistible.
Not bad at all.
| Title/Composers | Performer | Listen | Time | Size | Size | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | A Touch of Blessing | Evergrey | Play | 05:50 | 13 MB | 42 MB |
| 2 | Ambassador | Evergrey | Play | 04:29 | 10 MB | 35 MB |
| 3 | In the Wake of the Weary | Evergrey | Play | 04:43 | 10 MB | 37 MB |
| 4 | Harmless Wishes | Evergrey | Play | 04:18 | 9 MB | 32 MB |
| 5 | Waking Up Blind | Evergrey | Play | 04:22 | 10 MB | 27 MB |
| 6 | More Than Ever | Evergrey | Play | 04:13 | 9 MB | 33 MB |
| 7 | The Essence of Conviction | Evergrey | Play | 06:07 | 14 MB | 45 MB |
| 8 | Where All Good Sleep | Evergrey | Play | 04:37 | 10 MB | 35 MB |
| 9 | Faith Restored | Evergrey | Play | 03:54 | 8 MB | 23 MB |
| 10 | When the Walls Go Down | Evergrey | Play | 05:38 | 12 MB | 34 MB |
| 11 | I'm Sorry | Evergrey | Play | 03:27 | 7 MB | 23 MB |
| 12 | Recreation Day | Evergrey | Play | 03:32 | 8 MB | 22 MB |
| 13 | Madness Caught Another Victim | Evergrey | Play | 03:09 | 7 MB | 21 MB |
| 58 mins | 133 MB | |||||
| 58 mins | 415 MB | |||||
| Artist | Job | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Tom Englund | Engineer, Guitar, Mixing, Producer, Vocals |
| 2 | Evergrey | Primary Artist |
| 3 | Michael Håkansson | Bass |
| 4 | Arnold Lindberg | Engineer, Mixing |
| 5 | Dragan Tanaskovic | Mastering |
| Quality | Format | Encoding | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Standard | MP3 | 320kps 44.1kHz | MP3 is an audio coding format which uses a form of lossy data compression. The highest bitrate of this format is 320kbps (kbit/s). MP3 Digital audio takes less amount of space (up to 90% reduction in size) and the quality is not as good as the original one. |