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The Road Less Travelled marks the follow-up full-length release from Triosphere, the first album that will be made available in North America, and it is easily one of the most impressive new Progressive releases to hit store shelves in 2010, as well as one of the most unique recordings. The music for this release is clearly crafted by professionals that know a lot about the style they decided to perform, creating a highly entertaining album. But, it's not the music and how well it's performed on this album that makes this release a very unique effort at all. What is so different about this compared to many others is that the band is fronted by a female singer who also handles the bass, and does it without the music feeling some restricted to the generic female vocal confines of many female fronted bands today. In the same instance, this album is not your generic Progressive Metal composition with songs that jump wildly from one pace to another in almost a random creation. Each track on here moves fluidly from any sort of pace changes within the song, and features a very energetic and powerful performance. Most of the time the vocals stick to a mid-range, which could be best described as Tim "Ripper" Owens but female and without much abuse to the higher range singing, but even then the higher pitch isn't so high that it stems Triosphere into a Power Metal sound, but just becomes louder due to the raw emotion behind them. "Marionette" is the perfect example of this, which features the most energetic vocal performance on the entire album, and will make it pretty clear what the sex of the vocalist is since a good majority of the time, if you're not paying attention, you'll just consider it a male vocalist due to the layering being done. If you pay close enough attention though, you'll clearly see that it is not, and the range being used works perfectly throughout the entire album. Aside the song "Marionette", there are plenty of other powerful and/or beautiful songs on this release. "The Anger and the Silent Remorse" is another song that shows a really powerful vocal performance layered against music that just sounds like classic Progressive Metal, and thanks to the slightly raw recording, more like you just stepped into the early 90's of metal with a remastered album. "Human Condition" is a very heavy track that really shows some great guitar work that has the song changing between a slower song driven by the bass, to a faster, heavier track that just has some nice yet simple guitar chords that let the drums just take total command of the music and really grab your attention, refusing to let go. While the drumming on that song is great, "Death of Jane Doe" features some fantastic drumming that works hand in hand with everything else to just make a really heavy song that can become really fast paced with machine gun-like double bass kicks, especially at the end of the song. There really is nothing about this album that holds it back from greatness. Each track on here is fantastically composed, though once in a while you'll hear some structural similarities, musically and vocally, scattered about the album. Luckily, this is not enough to slightly deter your overall experience with the album, as there is just too many positive aspects to this release, such as the fantastic guitar solos on songs like "Watcher", the beautiful, passionate singing in "Marionette", as well as the fantastic drumming throughout the album. Every aspect of this release just comes together as if Triosphere has been a band for ages and worked on their material for just as long to mature into an incredible force, which is just something very rare to find in a fresher band in today's day and age, especially in the Progressive world of today. If you haven't had the fortune of discovering this band, whether it be a lack of knowledge or geographical issues, now is the perfect time to discover Triosphere. The Road Less Travelled is a very beautiful piece of work that will simply take your breath away and you have putting every other care and worry aside to be swept away into the majesty of this release. Sure, it has some slight repetition issues, but they could be overlooked this time around, as there's plenty to take in with this release that will have you coming back for repeat listens like some kind of crazed metal junkie. |
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