Heart of the Corona

I recently discovered Garden of Shadows and was blown away by Oracle Moon and I had to check out this EP, now even though it may not be as good as Oracle Moon was that doesn't mean this is bad as I enjoyed this just as much as Oracle Moon and I highly recommend checking this out if you liked Oracle Moon.

The first few songs on this album are pretty good they all have some great melodies like Oracle Moon but I find that the first few songs just kind of go by with nothing really memorable about them besides the few good melodies here and there, but Garden of Shadows manages to bring it back in the last half of the EP with a beautiful clean intro on Company in Solitude really catching my attention and so does the rest of the EP, the final 3 songs on this I'd say are up to Oracle Moon standards with great melodies and the clean section on Apollian Realm along with the opera like vocals behind it is beautiful, which is an occurring thing with the last few songs as they all have wonderful clean sections/intros.

Now I do have a few criticisms the first of which being that the album art for this EP is horrible, if I was walking through a record store and I saw this I would probably just walk right past it and not think a single thing about it, another thing this suffers from is the production of the EP as the guitars are very sharp sounding and in my opinion too loud compared to the rest of the instruments plus some mistakes can be heard in the guitar tracks on a few songs, combine this with the bass being WAY too quiet (id say almost as bad as Metallica's And Justice for All) and the final product just sounds very rushed and poor sounding.

I would recommend checking out Heart of the Corona if you're interested in hearing their earlier material but don't expect the same quality as Oracle Moon.