Illuminata
Where Stories Unfold

The Austrian band Illuminata managed to gain much money from a crowdfunding campaign and for that money they enlisted the help of the Czech Film Orchestra, choirs and such things to make their music large and epic. This opera has been used for the television series Game of Thrones, that Game of Thrones connections seems to be something that some reviewers are very impressed by and then totally celebrates this album unreservedly. But the strange thing is that the dangerous dog doesn’t concur with this and he likes everything unreservedly. For me this album has on paper everything a good album should have, female vocals, symphonies, grand compositions and a lot of exciting stuff. And like that isn’t enough, they also have a great looking cover artwork. This is going to be exciting, or so I thought before taking on this album.

The music is impressively majestic with a 60-piece symphony orchestra adding weight to the songs; the vocalist is brilliant and fits this kind of music perfectly. The production is fantastic, one of the better I have heard in this genre and that is a genre I am very familiar with as it is a genre that I really like and listen to a lot. I think that this Austrian five-piece has put together an excellent production, quite a bit of variation over the songs as well, which is always good. The playing time passes the hour mark and the tracks are eleven in case you wish to count them – two of them are around the ten-minute mark.

I think that this is a good album; it has excellent vocals and excellent production. But it is kind of like the movie Avatar, it looks brilliant but when you look deeper, at the story, there isn’t really anything of consequence there – we have seen it all before so many times that it stopped being interesting in the sixties. The same can be said about this album, it is so grand, mind-bogglingly epic and in many regards fantastic but when I go to analyse it more I start to feel that there is something missing, the songs aren’t good enough to complement this brilliant production. That is a real pity but it doesn’t make this album bad but it makes it a bit less fascinating than it could have been and if I were to select I would say that there are many better musical choices in this genre.

The only song that is a real standout is Phoenix that is a great song, the rest of the songs on the album seems to be good for a while but then turn in on themselves and loose the edge. Many songs seem too overworked and lose the edge and that turns what would have been a fantastic album into a fairly good album, that’s a bit of a shame. The thing is though that I may hear too much of this kind of music, too many bands, songs and albums and therefore demands more than the average guy but if you look beneath the façade of this album you cannot escape the feeling that there is something lacking.

Sometimes it is actually very hard to end a review and come up with a way to describe an album and this is one of those difficult ones, because with many albums a four or even a three pointer can be recommended for the fans of the genre but this is one of those albums from a genre that I like and consider myself a fan of – how do you say that a four pointer can be then? Well, I don’t know but you can enjoy it for the production’s sake as long as you avoid looking to deeply at it. I don’t think they are copies of or plagiarising Nightwish and neither do I think they have made a timeless classic. This is a decent album, well approved but not something that will go down in history as the genre contains many bands and albums that are a lot better than this – but maybe not that many that are as well produced soundwise.

HHHHHHH