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The Iron Cemetery (2013) is the second full-length album by Norwegian progressive power metal act Illusion Suite. Since the release of debut offering Final Hour (2009) the group has changed guitarist to Kim Jacobsen, replacing Øyvind "Lionheart" Larsen who departed the band in 2011.
When the term progressive power metal crops up it usually means one of two thinks. The most common would be power metal in progressive form (Wuthering Heights, Vandroya, Pyramaze to name a few) but it often also refers to (mistakenly, in my view) bands that play progressive metal with occasional influences from power metal (Symphony X, Evergrey, Tellus Requiem). Rarely however does the term (correctly, this time) apply to bands such as Illusion Suite, who play progressive metal in (more or less) power metal form. What's the difference you ask? A power metal album played in progressive form will still appeal first and foremost to power metal fans and will still be called a power metal album over a progressive metal album. An album like The Iron Cemetery does the exact opposite, being firmly orientated towards the progressive metal crowd and is obviously a progressive metal album before it is a power metal one, but it is a power metal one all the same.
Hopefully you get that, otherwise that was a wasted paragraph. But regardless, onto the more important stuff. As instrumentalists Illusion Suite are a great unit. The guitar playing from Kim Jacobsen is everything that I could want from a release that blends the progressive and power metal genres in such a way. Technical flourishes, fast riffs, plenty of melody, complexity but ultimately not done in such a way that the album sounds like an excuse for him to show off his skill. The writing is strictly song-based and where the band does tend to throw instrumental breaks in-between the vocals they don't elongate them in such a way that they last for minutes on end. Ironically this may just be the single more negative thought I can put down towards The Iron Cemetery; the album just isn't that long due to the more to the point nature of the writing. It doesn't even hit a full forty minutes. Consider that we're talking a genre where some bands write single songs longer than that and The Iron Cemetery starts to come over more like an EP than a full-length. The group's first album, which I haven't heard but have read up on, lasted just shy of an hour and including a song around the fifteen minute mark, so The Iron Cemetery is something of a change of pace. While it's impossible to say that The Iron Cemetery is toned down for progressive metal, it does all the time feel tantalisingly short.
The saving grace of course is that quality over quantity has certainly been applied to the album. The songs are high tier work from start to finish. Well, almost. There's a fifty-six second introductory track, imaginatively called Intro, that like most of its ilk doesn't add anything at all to the album, but from Orpheus' Quest onwards it's mostly top tier work. When Love Fails and Nero fall very slightly short of that highest of standards but are still exceptional. The only real difference is everything else combines prog's technicality and power metal's addictive catchiness so perfectly that when the latter is absent or simply to a lesser degree, it's felt.
Generally though this album is just pure gold and so it's only right that it is awarded a top tier rating. With songs like Uni-Twins, Nostradamus' First Prophecy and the title track, The Iron Cemetery is one of the finest albums of 2013 not just in prog, but in music itself.
98/100
(Originally written for Heavy Metal Haven: http://metaltube.freeforums.org/illusion-suite-the-iron-cemetery-t3100.html)