Music is a great and powerful tool, as you can use it to convey powerful emotions, feelings, and even hidden messages or you can go one step further, and create a story using lyrical themes that just smell of ideal storytelling material, such as a fantasy tale featuring lyrical concepts, such as knights, dragons and wizards for example. What if though, you say, you wanted to make an album that uses war, heaven & hell and quests and adventures as your lyrical themes? That's where the subject of todays review comes in and their name is SONIC PROPHECY.

Formed in 2008 in Salt Lake City, Utah, this six piece Heavy/Power Metal band have one EP, one single and two studio albums, with their second album "Apocalyptic Promenade" being the newest one. and the focus of this review. I'm curious to see if the lyrical themes the band uses can be used to tell a story that smells of either a masterpiece or something that is not really what you hoped it would be.

There are a total of eleven songs on this new album, with the first ten being new songs and the last one being an acoustic version of a song from their debut album. The opening track, which is the longest on the album, consists of two different parts, with the first being a narration and the second part being the main song itself, with the latter being the part that takes up most of the songs length, which totals around 12 1/2 minutes for both parts combined. And it's here where I start to worry, and although the rest of the albums songs aren't as long as the opening track, I still have doubts and concerns.

The reason why I worry is that long songs can often make the music on an otherwise promising album, seem dull and boring, especially if it drags on too long or if the production or sound sounds a bit too average and mediocre. Prog Rock is often the biggest offender of this trap but Heavy & Power Metal are equally guilty with these two being the traps that I have seen a lot of bands fall in to since I became a music journalist.

The music on the new SONIC PROPHECY album uses all the right ingredients for great story telling, including the guitar melodies and the orchestration of the keyboards, as well as the content of the lyrics, which is all well and good, but there's a few things I'm unsure about which include the production and the vocals.

The production on the record is good for what it is, but the way the music is mixed and sounds is my main concern, as yes, I do like it a bit given how every element seems to fit for an album of this type but the music can often drag on a bit even on the shorter songs and it's after the longest song on the album, which by the way, is the longest song, that you start to wonder if the other songs can win the album back some points.

The second gripe I have is with the vocals, as I do give the singer a tiny bit of credit for actually putting some effort into his performance, but the quality of the performance is a bit off putting and most of the time I cannot hear what is being said because, either the music is louder then the vocals, the production is a bit iffy on the vocal parts, or if there's a bit too much screaming on a few of the songs, and it's a mixture of all of these which makes me a bit unsure.

Bottom line, the new SONIC PROPHECY album is not really my cup of tea, as the concept is interesting given the bands lyrical themes and the artwork on the front of the album. But when listening to it, I'm not sure if the music on this really tells a story I can get into all that much without losing interest, but that's just me, as there are those who may like it but I will always remain unsure about whether or not I like this or not given the reasons I have stated in this review.<