LUCID DREAMING — The Chronicles Pt. I (review)

LUCID DREAMING — The Chronicles Pt. I album cover

Album · 2013 · Power Metal

1/5 · 2013-09-03
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The Chronicles Pt. I (2013) is the debut album by German metal opera project Lucid Dreaming. The project is the brainchild of Elvenpath guitarist Till Oberboßel who plays guitars, bass and keyboards on the album. He is joined by a few guest musicians and a cast of vocalists including Elvenpath bandmate Dragutin Kremenovic and Skelator's Jason Conde-Houston.

The music operates within the traditional heavy and power metal genres, mostly focusing on the latter although there is still a good deal of slower paced melodic heavy metal to be found on The Chronicles Pt. I. The playing is fairly straight forward work in keeping with the standards of both styles and it seems clear after a while listening to the album that Till Oberboßel is either unwilling or unable to step out of his comfort zone. This is sometimes a good or a band thing with a musician or band. Some don't need to fix that which is not broken. Melodic death metal act Amon Amarth have pretty much forged a career on that philosophy. Others are not so fortunate. Lucid Dreaming is one of the others. The music is generic and a bland kind of generic at that. It would perhaps be a bit more tolerable, but after the obligatory intro track is out the way Till and company begin deliver tracks of at least six minutes in length as standard, even going up to 11:35 for To Caer Dathyl. So it takes a while for each song to conclude and I don't think there's a single one here that doesn't outstay its welcome and end up in boredom territory. The power metal parts of the album are, naturally for the genre, a bit more lively than the traditional metal ones but that's really the only thing that ever manages to get the music going a bit.

The vocal department could have saved an album like this. Unfortunately that's not the case either. There are a lot of voices on the album. I'm afraid I don't have much prior experience of most of them except for Jason Conde-Houston and even then my experience is limited to Skelator's latest album Agents of Power (2012) so I can't say I was particularly able to single out any one singer's contributions on the album. It's the usual deal that you can expect for a metal opera though, with both male and female vocalists, and several different voice types. For the most part the vocals work about as well as the music, which is to say they're also what you can expect from the genres on offer. What really stuck out to lower my regard of The Chronicles Pt. I even more was that there's at least one male voice here who sings in the rougher style that some of the heavier power metal bands (ironically, usually also German) like Grave Digger and Rebellion have pulled off, which would work really well on just one condition; if the music ever actually got heavy enough to rival the work of those aforementioned bands. It doesn't. Lucid Dreaming definitely operates on the so called cheese filled side of the power metal genre, so these vocals just come across as out of place.

The Chronicles Pt. I has been one of the biggest power metal disappointments of 2013 for me. Okay, so having not listened to Elvenpath in particular I didn't as such have any expectations for Till Oberboßel's solo project but power metal is a genre I count as a favourite; I listen to it a lot and I know what I like and what sort of standards I hold to a new group releasing their debut in the genre. Lucid Dreaming falls far short. The generic nature of the release and what amounts to some poor vocal choices aside, what really trips the album up is its overall length. I mentioned the individual long running times but there are ten tracks here not counting the intro, resulting in just over seventy-six minutes of music. That's quite a slog when it only rarely gives a semblance of anything exciting or inspired. To cut a long story short it's boring. The album was a real chore to get through and even then could not be done in a single sitting. Even taking it in two halves my attention wandered so much I still don't have any conception of identity between the songs. A bad album tier rating is deserved. If I could get through it in one go I guess I'd go up to 'above average' but well, that's the difference isn't it.

32/100

(Originally written for Heavy Metal Haven: http://metaltube.freeforums.org/lucid-dreaming-the-chronicles-pt-i-t3153.html)