Season of Dreams
My Shelter

The debut album by Season of Dreams is called My Shelter and is an album with a pretty neat artwork, looks a bit dreamy. Jean-Michel Volz is the man behind the moniker, and he wanted Pasi Humppi to do the vocals, but Humppi was busy so he recommended Johannes Nyberg who does the vocals and keyboards, Johannes brother John does some guitar solos on the album. Johannes and Jean-Michel found great chemistry and wrote lots of songs for this debut. So what can we say about it?

The music can be described as heavy metal or power metal, with pretty decent production. It has good melodies and is a pretty catchy album that shows a pretty good depth, and some interesting keyboard lines that add character and depth to the songs. The vocals are poor though, and they aren’t helping the album at all. And with fourteen songs it is also an album that is a tad on the long side, more than a tad actually and I think that they could shorten it by at least four songs for a more sensible playing time.

Well, if you could disregard the vocals this album is good, perhaps even very good. But you cannot really disregard the vocals, can you? The keys are good, really, I like the nuances they add to the songs, the production is adequate, and I tend to think that with decent vocals this could have been a fairly great album. But it hasn’t great vocals, not even close and that is really sad as it feels like this album could have been something quite special.

I don’t think this is a particularly good album, the vocals are ruining it for me. I don’t want to be picky about the vocalist, my guess is that he could do better than this. Perhaps next time. But this album don’t really do anything for me, it is quite dull and quite dreary, and I cannot really think much positive things to write about it. There are several positives but all I can hear is the weaker parts and I just want to turn it off, immediately.

HHHHHHH