Sounds of Beautiful Experience

"...into the lake of the swans..."

I remember hearing people saying that there's nothing new in metal quite a bit (this is '95, mind you). Apparently they weren't looking hard enough, but when they were reading RIP and Metal Edge magazines, what did they expect? I had already paraded around town with The Gathering's Mandylion and Celestial Season's Solar Lovers, then you had bands like Pyrogenesis, Sentenced, Moonspell, and Therion doing splendid jobs overturning rocks, and to help out was Greece's On Thorns I Lay. Formerly Phlebotomy (the name they released their '93 Dawn of Grief ep under), the four-piece are described by their label as 'voluptuous forward metal'. Well, I'm not quite sure what that was supposed to mean, but the lp's title expresses much of what this band have in store for awaiting ears.

Vestiges of atmosphere blanket these nine tracks with innovation mixing sketches of black and death metal, pseudo-classical keyboards, and gothic rock to create an expanse of moods from the serene to the frenetic and a plethora of dispositions in-between. Vocalist Steven erases any sense of one-dimensional characterization as he springs from a normal spoken narrative to primal bellowing to a snarl charge and even tone-teaming as heard in the initial epic "Voluptuous Simplicity of the Line". There are very few conventional parts to this disc, and in order to fully appreciate what OTIL were trying to do, you may have to be feeling the pangs of boredom with metal. Then again, many people today would find this tedious and not 'true' metal 'cause it tends to fade in and out that realm at times. Apparently, some of what was then considered experimental and original is now scoffed at as some perversion of the style, but to each his own.

All the songs featured are along similar mind-bending waves with the exception of the symphonic "A Dreamer Can Touch the Sky" which is laden with dramatic classical influences via piano, keys, and deep percussion in a militant Holst fashion, reminding of a King Diamond intro and Elend crossed. Fifty-five minutes of experimental, stellar music by the then average-age-of-17 band engineered by Magus Wampyr Daoloth of Necromantia and produced by Efthimis Karadimas of Nightfall makes this star-studded not just in the musical vein, though I do believe the production needed more thickness.