When the debut album of the progressive Death Metal band THE ARCHETYPE called "The Fallen Grace" came to my hands I was really interested to see what this newly formed Italian band has achieved since I am a huge fan of the genre. While making a small research about them I also found out that they stated bands such as OPETH,NEVERMORE and KATATONIA as their influences, which made my interest even bigger since I dig all these great bands. But unfortunately the result was far from satisfying.

"The Fallen Grace" starts with "The Fall" and "Parasites", two promising songs with a duration of less than 6 minutes with the band favoring much more the progressive Metal and melodic elements in these. The songs I must admit were really good with interesting riffs, good melodies and beautiful combination of growls and clean vocals. What I found a really interesting idea was that only in these songsGianluca Rossi 's clean vocals were very close to the style of Ray Adler (of FATES WARNING). Howeverthis style of singing just coveredin a percentage the singer's inability to perform good clean vocals, hiding temporarily his main weakness which was about to become even more obvious in the rest of the album.

The rest of the songs on the other hand were completely disappointing. THE ARCHETYPE make a wanna-be OPETH attempt, rising the duration of the songs to over 6 minutes, and simply fail. The bigger the duration of the songs is the more tiring and predictable they become. Also many melodic changes between the 'death' and the 'progressive' parts seem kind of forced to and don't really fit. But the main weakness that totally ruins every good effort is the clean vocals which are a complete disaster. There are some good riffs and ideas but they cannot save the day. In every song they try to sound more like OPETH and totally fail, even in the simple acoustic "Memoria" (with Italian lyrics) trying to create something similar to "Den Standiga Resan".

Summing up, "The Fallen Grace" is nothing special and the band (and especially the singer) need to improve very much in order to create something good. The first couple of songs and the very good production are not enough to make this album worth your money and time.