Souls Of Diotima - The Sorceress Reveals - Atlantis

Souls Of Diotima is a band that has been going on for more than a decade with some three albums to their name including this one. Their style is a rather unconventional, quite theatrical, dare I say power metal inspired hybrid, that may be female fronted, but it is arranged in ways that fit a concept and not really your run of the mill power metal of the European variety. There lies both their strength and weakness. In attempting to do something not a million miles away from say what Nightwish attempted with “Imaginaerum”, but several notches harder and less “dreamy” but quite more geared towards epic, way more akin to mythology – and specifically the lore about the lost continent of Atlantis, they create a very specific template, which is a little restrictive and makes the inclusion of several interludes necessary to try and “explain” the story to the listener and move it forward.
 
Without being bad, “The Sorceress Reveals – Atlantis” is greatly bogged, by the way too many interludes… that really work counter productively really not helping with immersion, despite being designed to do just that.
 
The closest thing that Souls Of Diotima brought to my mind is a less neoclassic-ally adept Amberian Dawn (Capri era) with a concept, which really doesn’t help them to be direct and it’s a shame since songs like “Tears of Fury” and a few more are quite good actually, but just lost in a playlist of twenty tracks and over seventy-three minutes…
 
Worth checking out, but they should curb their own enthusiasm and edit their ideas a bit to be more accessible imho.