Celestial Wizard
Winds of the Cosmos

Celestial Wizard’s second album Winds of the Cosmos is described as a veritable blend of power metal and death metal. The press sheet seems to think it is much for fans of Swedish death metal like Dark Tranquility, Amon Amarth, Arch Enemy to name some of the bands they count. The cover is quite cool, and I read that themes are a mix of fantasy and sci-fi themes ranging from Dungeons and Dragons to space travellers and black holes – sounds interesting. But press writers often have a tendency to oversell their bands, so how about this one, is it as interesting as it appears?

Musically it is quite classic metal death metal, clean vocals and croaky ones, some choirs, nothing surprising on the vocal style – a bit too generic for my taste. They have strong focus on melodies and catchiness, which can gain them easy points. There are some feeling of video game in the intro and the final track for example. We also hear quite typical riffs, a decent variation over nine tracks and 42 minutes. The production is adequate, nothing really special, but it works for the album. Overall it isn’t a too shabby production, though it certainly could have been less generic if it wanted to stand out.

It is that lack of freshness and novelty that is the downfall of this album – I like how some of it makes me think of classic videogames, like Megaman, but overall it isn’t fresh or exciting enough for me to retain interest more than a few seconds here and there. The songs are a bit too typical for the genre, not bad or anything, just not exciting or fresh like it needs to be in order to make any kind of mark in today’s musical climate. I wished for the winds of the cosmos to be blowing in with fresh and surprising, never heard thing, but instead we get a blowback of what everyone else in the genre have done already. That is not the recipe for anything but a generic and ultimately meaningless album.

For Celestial Wizard it is not unlikely that there is a great album on the horizon, they do have some exciting ideas. Unfortunately for them, and for us who listen, these ideas aren’t coming through much on this album that I felt excited about until I heard the vocals for the first time. It has a cool intro that ultimately leads to a generic album. There is potential in this band, but Winds of the Cosmos blows winds of boredom into my face.

HHHHHHH