Red Circuit - Haze of Nemesis

Red Circuit Haze of Nemesis cover
Red Circuit
Haze of Nemesis
Limb Music
2014
7.5
Red Circuit is a band that have been going on for almost a decade, and in that time frame has managed to put out a trio, (if one would include this one) of rather decent melodic metal albums out. Basing its strength on Markus Teske, a keyboardist who holds membership in many band and is responsible chiefly for the songwriting and Chity Somapala, that people might remember, apart from probably being the only metal musician of Sri Lankan origin that they could possibly think of, (and solely because he came to some prominence when he became a member of Firewind that is, even though he’s pretty talented not withstanding) Red Circuit offers an album that should appease all fans of lyrical power metal, ala Kamelot, a much better, more original alternative to Firewind, or a far less adventurous Symphony X.
 
While “Haze...” is a definite upgrade over its predecessors it seems to suffer from the same major issue, which is the fact that most of the songs seem to be based around the middle tempos. While the band manages to have quite intriguing and endearing melodies a bit more variation in speed all around or even within the songs themselves, would have certainly benefited them greatly. With the exception of a couple of tunes, like the impressive opener “Oceans Apart”, “Silent Roaring” and portions of the extravagantly long “My Serenade” most of the other tunes are either mid-tempo or slow, making the whole album plod a bit.
 
That’s not to say that songs like “My Lonely Heaven”, “My World Collides” a classy duet/ballad with Amanda Somerville or the atmospheric and exotic “Haze of Nemesis” are bad. Nothing could be furthest from the truth. There are also a couple of covers. An even more eccentric take on “Digging in the Dirt” which had me thinking if it was gonna be a Peter Gabriel cover and by the instrumentation, it was given initially I had trouble recognizing it. It’s a meta-modern metal take on the already – “weird” tune. There’s also “Soldier of Fortune” that exists as a bonus track, obviously the well-known and much loved Deep Purple tune, done a little more liberally and given a bit more metallized solo. Chity also does the song completely in his own voice, not trying to “copy” Coverdale’s vocal style, which bodes pretty well.
 
As a special bonus, the package will contain a DVD, which includes the band’s show at the Progpower USA XII Festival in Atlanta 2011. We now need only to mention that there is a video to “Oceans Apart” on YouTube, which was filmed at the Red Circuit show at the ‘Rock Meets Reggae Festival’ in Colombo, Sri Lanka in February 2014.
 
In all honesty this is a really well-crafted album that’s worth checking out, which only slightly suffers in terms of pacing and maybe could benefit a bit from some more scrutiny in the songwriting that would offer a greater tempo variation (so I’m pretty much still saying the same thing I suppose.) Still very much worth your time…