Avatarium
The Girl with the Raven Mask
Nuclear Blast
2015
Avatarium’s debut that came out a couple of years ago managed to paradoxically intoxicate us with its Candlemass-like riffs being antagonized by Jennie-Ann Smith’s Grace Slick meets Stevie Nicks vocals in a concoction both bizarre but strangely too beautiful and alluring to not consume. An EP allowed the band to buy some time, before Leif announced a break from touring activities due to an undisclosed illness but that didn’t stop the band from composing a new album, which they present to us now, a year later.
The style is unmistakably theirs, but if the first album felt more epic, gloomier and grandiose a more stripped production the slightly more varied tempos and the slightly more experimental nature of some of the material, make this follow-up, feel a little different. While the band’s debut was almost thoroughly great, even exceptional in places, this sophomore feels to try harder but still not achieving quite the same effect and I cannot blame Jennie-Ann’s singing for that, her performance actually greatly enhances the result greatly…
“Girl with the Raven Mask” opens with its title track, which is surprisingly fast paced, a heavy psych rocker, whose fuzzy riff brought to my mind slightly Candlemass’ “Black Dwarf” under a bad trip… it’s catchy as hell though…
“The January Sea” doesn’t hurry through its near eight minutes and sounds quite convincing, vast and meandering, allowing you to get “drowned” in the hopelessness of its waters.
“Pearls and Coffins” is a lot more minimalist and while it’s cruel and bizarre chorus is delivered beautifully by J-Ann, it’s psychedelic latter part didn’t really work for me… obviously it has some pretty good moments, but they don’t quite seem to work as a whole as well as the previous songs.
“Hypnotized” has a nice enough chorus and it’s hard to resist the siren named Jennie-Ann, but the song doesn’t seem to grab you like those of the debut did and I would like to attribute that more to the cleaner, more treble balanced sound...
“Ghostlights” (have people in Nuclear Blast been copying each other’s titles? lol) manages to reverse the sentiment with its heavy main riff… but I still felt that the more rough around the edges and warmer sound of the debut was superior. The song goes largely instrumental with extended solos and J-A chipping in a couple of more times before it fades away in the mists of time…
To allow to “Run Killer Run” with its quite triumphant riff that seems to evoke somewhat memories of the late Mark Reale, albeit in a fuzzier way, to rise… interesting I must say…
“Iron Mule” must be dragging its heavy feet to some funeral with its death-like procession and feels a bit like a distant cousin of maybe “Moonhorse” but nowhere as brilliant…
Jennie-Ann’s ecstatic and ireful singing in the middle section of “The Master Thief” sends all other occult-lyric singing girlies home to play with their black magic dolls(!)… but overall the song feels like it’s dragging on rather aimlessly at some point…
Lastly on some versions there’s a cover of Led Zeppelin’s “In My Time of Dying” that sounds pretty sweet and on the Limited Edition a DVD with the band’s 2014 Hammer Of Doom performance that seems to be making that configuration more desirable.
Inferior to the band’s awesome debut, “The Girl with the Raven Mask” might be greeted with apprehension by some fans that might think that the band was a side project, but it’s not that bad of an album, all in all… it just had the misfortune of following a really good one that has really grown on me too since its release…
The style is unmistakably theirs, but if the first album felt more epic, gloomier and grandiose a more stripped production the slightly more varied tempos and the slightly more experimental nature of some of the material, make this follow-up, feel a little different. While the band’s debut was almost thoroughly great, even exceptional in places, this sophomore feels to try harder but still not achieving quite the same effect and I cannot blame Jennie-Ann’s singing for that, her performance actually greatly enhances the result greatly…
“Girl with the Raven Mask” opens with its title track, which is surprisingly fast paced, a heavy psych rocker, whose fuzzy riff brought to my mind slightly Candlemass’ “Black Dwarf” under a bad trip… it’s catchy as hell though…
“The January Sea” doesn’t hurry through its near eight minutes and sounds quite convincing, vast and meandering, allowing you to get “drowned” in the hopelessness of its waters.
“Pearls and Coffins” is a lot more minimalist and while it’s cruel and bizarre chorus is delivered beautifully by J-Ann, it’s psychedelic latter part didn’t really work for me… obviously it has some pretty good moments, but they don’t quite seem to work as a whole as well as the previous songs.
“Hypnotized” has a nice enough chorus and it’s hard to resist the siren named Jennie-Ann, but the song doesn’t seem to grab you like those of the debut did and I would like to attribute that more to the cleaner, more treble balanced sound...
“Ghostlights” (have people in Nuclear Blast been copying each other’s titles? lol) manages to reverse the sentiment with its heavy main riff… but I still felt that the more rough around the edges and warmer sound of the debut was superior. The song goes largely instrumental with extended solos and J-A chipping in a couple of more times before it fades away in the mists of time…
To allow to “Run Killer Run” with its quite triumphant riff that seems to evoke somewhat memories of the late Mark Reale, albeit in a fuzzier way, to rise… interesting I must say…
“Iron Mule” must be dragging its heavy feet to some funeral with its death-like procession and feels a bit like a distant cousin of maybe “Moonhorse” but nowhere as brilliant…
Jennie-Ann’s ecstatic and ireful singing in the middle section of “The Master Thief” sends all other occult-lyric singing girlies home to play with their black magic dolls(!)… but overall the song feels like it’s dragging on rather aimlessly at some point…
Lastly on some versions there’s a cover of Led Zeppelin’s “In My Time of Dying” that sounds pretty sweet and on the Limited Edition a DVD with the band’s 2014 Hammer Of Doom performance that seems to be making that configuration more desirable.
Inferior to the band’s awesome debut, “The Girl with the Raven Mask” might be greeted with apprehension by some fans that might think that the band was a side project, but it’s not that bad of an album, all in all… it just had the misfortune of following a really good one that has really grown on me too since its release…