Concept album about Spanish voyage of exploration? Yes! They found new world, America, remember?! A metal album about it?! Yes, partly. There's a lot of styles mixed, such as heavy metal, 70s acid rock, maybe even some thrash metal etc.

This kind of a task is tough, for sure. Serenade's effort can't be called as a success. First of all: production sucks. It is low demo level work. Someone forgot to mix this properly. More quiet 'Beyond the Mist' sounds better, but heavier parts sound like listener has some porridge inside ears. On 'Daring to Dream', bass vanishes for 30 seconds. Why on earth it is made this way? Playing, on the other hand, doesn't work too well. It's not tight, actually this does include some awful playing mistakes here and there. When guys get it right, there's no moaning about playing. Probably their studio time was too short: recording in 6 days and mixing in 2 days.

I could tolerate these faults, if the music was interesting enough. But sadly this is not how it is. There are some better parts scattered over this platter. Serenade's original sin is bad compositions, there's just parts after parts after parts. Patchy as hell! But when the band got it rolling, the style was unique. Sadly it happened only rarely.

When all this is glazed with extremely bad vocals, it is like a final nail to the coffin. 'Introduction: 1492' has unbeliavably affected narration. Cristobal Colon is the main character. Spanish explorer with Scottish pronouncing?! Gimme a break! Clean vocals are awful, because the guy can't handle them properly. He's trying to hit right notes, but keeps on searching them. Growling is, well growling, and not fitting here too well. The vocals just steal the show, but for all the wrong reasons.

Not my fault if the guys haven't got enough studio time. This kind of album needs to be much more polished. This just doesn't work. As a demo, this could be tolerable, but not as a full length album.

Rating: 2+ (out of 10) ratings explained

Reviewed by Lane
10/30/2002 17:02