Into Eternity - Dead Or Dreaming


Year of Release: 2001
Label: DVS Records
Catalog Number: DVS004
Format: CD
Total Time: 44:14:00

This is Canadian band Into Eternity's second album and the follow up to the very promising self titled debut.

Into Eternity combine progressive metal with death metal spiced up with hints of thrash and aggressive power metal. The vocals are part clean and part death grunts. Although I normally can't stand death vocals, there are a few reasons why this might work for those who are not into growling, mainly because the music emphasizes on the clean vocals - which are very impressive by the way. The melody-lines are accessible, haunting and very melodic while the instrumentation is top notch and there are enough technical details to keep you interested. The band is also aware of the importance of variety, and slow down once in a while with acoustic parts and beautiful female vocals. The overall strong progressive metal and power metal influence will also make this appealing to general fans of those genres. It is a tough task to combine these genres, but Into Eternity do it masterfully. While the debut suffered from a poor production, Dead Or Dreaming has a much stronger and tighter production which is of huge importance especially with those crushing riffs and twin leads.

There are a handful of killer songs here, but there are also a few songs that fail to interest me, lacking the strong melody-lines of the better songs. And as they are already on thin ice with the death grunts, the melodies must be really present for me to fully enjoy the songs. Having that said, this is only the case with 2-3 songs. The remaining songs are all of very high quality and due to the haunting, accessible melodies this album is worth getting for fans of any of the abovementioned genres.

[This review originally appeared November 2002 at the ProgPower Online review site -ed.]


Tracklisting:
Absolution Of The Soul (3:58) / Distant Pale Future (5:07) / Shallow (6:14) / Unholy (Fields Of The Dead) (4:53) / Elysium Dream (4:38) / Selling God (3:07) / Imagination Overdose (3:46) / Dead Or Dreaming (4:17) / Cyber Messiah (4:29) / Identify (3:45)

Musicians:
Daniel Nargang - lead and backing vocals, guitar
Jim Austin - drums, death vocals
Tim Roth - lead and death vocals, guitar
Scott Krall - bass, backing vocals

Additional musicians:

Chris McDougall - keyboards
Amy Ozog - vocals (5, 6, 9)

Discography:
Into Eternity (1999/2000)
Dead Or Dreaming (2001/2002)
Buried In Oblivion (2004)
The Scattering Of Ashes (2006)
The Incurable Tragedy (2008)

Genre: Progressive-Power Metal

Origin CA

Added: January 1st 2005
Reviewer: Bjørnar Bevolden
Score:
Artist website: www.intoeternity.net
Hits: 3466
Language: english

  

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