Review Coexistence

French-Swedish band with French and a Swede coexists to make music is releasing their debut album, a release that they fund all by themselves while looking for a record company to sign them up. They say to be inspired by progressive bands like Dream Theater, Pink Floyd and so on. Their demo released a few years back was according to the band well received by reviewers which is something I take their word for as I have not researched this, the reviews for the Flow album which the debut album is called has been mainly quite reserved as far as I have been able to detect. Some positive reviews I have seen as well but nothing extremely positive and most seem to agree on the fact that the band is very skilled but they lack in song writing. The artwork looks quite promising though, so there is something that might be interesting with this band.

As you might have been able to guess from the bands said to inspire these guys I think you might be able to guess how this multinational band coexisting in the musical world sound. Yes, progressive metal it is and it has a quite darkish sound I would say, like they are taking out the darker sides of their existences and puts it in musical form. The songs are quite varied, one ballad and one very long typical progressive epic and eight quite normal progressive songs. The sound is not overly melodic but quite sterile with just a touch of melody and mainly guitar driven, quite heavy in many parts as well. Production and sound is really good, quite powerful and well polished and in all aspects an impressive production. The singer called Carl has a diversity and passion in his voice that he applies through the music on this album that has ten tracks and it plays for 68 minutes.

I think this album has a lot going for it, it has an excellent sound and the musicians are really good at what they do. I think they have everything going for them to make good music and I think the quality of the songs are overall quite good with the ballad being the top track on the album with a great melody and feel. A quality feel can be felt over the music of this album and the band does well in the songs department. There is a big but in all of this though as the songs to not quite grab me and the album ends up feeling rather average in the end. It is like they have packaged everything in a really good looking box but when coming to the contents there is not much to match what is seen on the outside, I think you can compare it to and HRT or Virgin F1 car, it looks like an F1 car but it is really way slower than every other F1 car but just being an F1 car is still very good.

I think that the best illustration of this fact is the final song, the 24 minute epic called Akira that shows up all these great skills and there are several elements of this song that are really good but as a whole it ends being fragmented and stagnant, the song isn’t really going anywhere and the same is true for most of the songs on this album which is a shame because there is potential here but I feel that they are lacking in direction and the album ends up feeling quite stagnant, it is quite good while you listen but in the end there is only one track that I recall is the ballad A Rose to Wither.

I think this album has things going for if nothing else it is a good debut and a little glimpse of the potential that this band has in store and maybe just a little indication of what can be possible. I think this album has a good sound and as I stated a really good performance but the songs lack the necessary flow to make it really work, I would have liked it more melodic in a Dream Theaterish kind of way. I think though that there are many fans of progressive metal that may like this album, it is well made but as I said the songs lack direction which makes the album feel a bit stagnant.

Coexistence makes a decent debut album with promise of more in the future, the sound is brilliant but I think the songs lack the necessary flow to make it great. So an approved album that could have been so much more.

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Coexistence Flow

Coexistence
Flow