It's always a pleasure to get demos from freshly formed bands that have not yet signed a record deal and try to promote themselves by themselves. No matter the music quality, it's always an honor, for me at least, to get a first taste of the creative efforts of musicians that try to make the prime steps in the music scene we all love. Well, this is exactly the case with OBLIVION ECHO, a band that hails from my homeland (Greece) and specifically from Edessa. The band's story begins seven years ago when Thanasis, Kaisaras and John formed OBLIVION ECHO in order to work on avant-garde musicianship through a Heavy Metal prism.
The lineup additions expanded their music profile with female soprano vocals and a great deal of non metal musical instruments paving the way for the creation of a more personal and even unique sound. The band's promo CD A Dream Within A Dream reached the Metal Temple headquarters in very well designed package proving that there has been a lot of effort on it.
The opening track of the demo entitled Last Farewell kicks in with a surprise comprising some flute and violin melodies. The Metal profile is revealed as soon as the distorted guitars enter keeping a mid tempo while the male vocals implement a clean and a brutal approach. The atmospheric break brings the soprano female vocals and as another surprise a violin solo. Some interesting ideas that bring to mind bands like MY DYING BRIDE and THEATER OF TRAGEDY can be found near the end where the guitars take the leading role along with some fast drumming. The second track A Dream Within A Dream enters with some clean guitar arpeggios soft male singing and the melodic finishing of the violin. Here the production seems to be a little bit rough regarding the annoying sliding sound upon the classic guitar's chords especially in the song's beginning. Usually, the Greek singers suffer from the ascent problem making their singing difficult to follow; fortunately Voyias fells out of this unfortunate category and delivers some pretty good low pitched vocals. A Dream Within A Dream is an atmospheric track with some TIAMAT influences from the Wildhoney era. The third and last song of the demo is entitled Take Me Away and features some vocal experimentation where the clean male vocals blend with female soprano opera vocals. This is a piano based track with minor distorted guitar additions.
OBLIVION ECHO has been working hard inside the studio and this is proven by the variety of melodies and ideas heard on this 13 minutes of music. My personal opinion is that there are too many ideas in these three tracks (possible make more tracks out of them) that could make the listening rather difficult and definitely needs additional CD spins to grow. On the other hand the creativity is there, waiting to be fully deployed for the future and debut full length OBLIVION ECHO release. The band is currently working on the official web site so the link provided might not work.