Album Review: Evergrey - A Heartless Portrait

Oh look, it's another Evergrey album. For a band that has been around twenty-five years, they have done very little to ever impress me. There's a trifecta of things working against them. 1)They are now putting out albums too quickly, leaving me tired of them before I ever hear each new one. 2)They are the brand of 'progressive' metal that isn't progressive in any way, so I get frustrated trying to wrap my head around why our nomenclature is so stupid. 3)Tom Englund's voice rubs me the wrong way. I know he is widely regarded as one of the best singers in metal, but not to me.

This album adds a fourth issue that the last couple of records didn't have to worry about; production. While the guitars have all the mechanical heaviness you could want from a metal record of this kind, Tom's vocals are buried in the back of the mix, especially in the choruses, which leaves everything sounding small and muffled. What is supposed to be epic instead sounds tinny, and tiny, and I grow tired of straining my ears to make out what he's trying to sing.

The formula for this album should be more up my alley. The construction of the songs is closer to the "Torn" era, which is looked down upon by a lot of fans, but it's when the focus on tight songwriting was strongest. These songs don't meander nearly as much as many of the recent records, but having the hooks come out sounding this flat defeats the entire purpose. It certainly makes it harder to embrace a song like "Ominous" where the chorus is so bland. Instead of being a change of pace, it merely uses a different shade of boring to paint with.

The title track gives us a horribly stilted segue from the verse to chorus, where it sounds like two separate songs being grafted together with duct tape, with the band trying to pass it off as if it was meant to be that way. A times, it feels like they think as long as they have a heavy riff and Tom wailing, nothing else matters. It's true that there will be people who can look past all the rest, because they enjoy the Evergrey sound. That isn't a very convincing argument to me.

Perhaps the issue stems from Tom's side project, Silent Skies, where everything is ambient and subtle. That subtlety of melody turns into a flat-line when the music amps up to Evergrey's metallic roar, and that makes up a majority of the album. "Heartless" is a really good song, but it's the outlier, as more of the record falls into the mediocrity of "Call Out The Dark", where the entire chorus is flatly repeating the title. I think I know what the band is going for, but they are so far off the mark it's hard to know for sure.

Every time I listen to Evergrey, it's a matter of what direction the flaws will take me. They have corrected course in some respects, but drifted away in others. Like always, Evergrey is a band with a great sound, but in search of great songs.