Ivory Tower
Stronger

Now it is a handful of albums for Ivory Tower, the German progressive metal band that released the debut album all the way back in 1998 and the fourth album in 2011. Eight years has passed since that latest album and they have joined forces with a new vocalist and have an Yrlund designed artwork that looks rather good for this new offering. It also sports a dozen tracks and a 76-minute playing time, that is a bit long but it is not uncommon for progressive metal albums to be long and contain long songs. And this album has good depth which makes the playing time more acceptable, even though I still think that it is a little it on the long side.

I think a band like Pyramaze is a good comparison; they have the same kind of high-energy progressive metal with a lot of power and strong vocals. The production is good; I think the album has a good and little bit rough sound that is a bit less polished than much of the modern progressive stuff is. They also go towards the extreme at times, a bit of metalcore and such things add depth even though I personally am a bit less impressed by those parts compared with some of the other elements of this album. This is a quality production that sees the band play on their strengths and do it really well.

Really strong album with strong tracks and some impressive melodies, the slight negative I see is the long playing time, they could have cut away two songs or shortened all the songs a little bit but that isn’t a major thing. It works, it is good, the songs are good, In Me is probable the best song but it is quite even between the tracks with Strong as the weakest one but no track really stands out from the rest and I suppose it could be said that the album as a whole is stronger than any single track, even though I think that the whole could have been just a little bit shorter.

If you like bands like Pyramaze there is a good chance that you will like this, it is also a decent chance that you will like it if you like bands like Dream Theater or other similar progressive metal. It is a very solid album that has been put together by this German band that probably have been flying under the radar a little bit as they haven’t been putting out plenty of albums and such, but this album is a good showcase of progressive metal – well worth checking out.

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