By David Stewart
Founded back in 2010 in Quebec, Canada, The Lightbringer deliver to us their third offering, ‘From The Void To Existence’. This is their first release since their almost flawless and majestic album ‘Heptanity’ in the summer of 2017, which was a full seven years after their debut album ‘Quintessence Of Dawn’.
With this release the band takes a darker, more atmospheric approach, not only musically but also in the course of the storytelling throughout each of the tracks of this concept album.
Musically, the album is a mix of power metal and melodic black metal. I know, two very different and somewhat opposing genres, but the band pull it off really well and blend it nicely together to make it work. The guitar work is solid throughout with great leads, almost tranquil melodies and some high-quality power metal riffs. This is balanced out nicely with well executed tremolo black metal style riffs to help merge the two different genres together which works to great effect.
As for the drumming, just like the guitar work, it’s about making two very different sub-genres within metal come together and it is pulled off here with exactitude. There’s great double kick drumming and blast beats a plenty to satisfy the most diehard of black metal fans.
All types of metal music require different types of vocal styles. Black metal has its harsh, screaming and throaty types of vocals, while power metal requires a cleaner approach to vocals. Here the three vocalists in the band pull it off to great effect, with guitarist and bassist Olivier V.Girard supplying the harsh vocals while Stanislav Stefanovski and Fanny Grenier supply the clean vocals. If you’ve never heard the band before, the best way that I could describe how the vocals work together would be, think of Cradle Of Filths collaborations with Liv Kristine to get some type of idea how it works.
As much as I enjoyed the music and vocals contained within this release unfortunately, for me anyhow, there is negative to the album that I have to bring up and that is the running time of a number of the tracks. Out of the ten tracks included here only two are over three and a half minutes long and one of those is the final track on the album which is an instrumental. The rest of the songs are between just over a minute and a half to just a little under three minutes. I had to not only check, but triple check to make sure I had the full release as a lot of the album came across like samplers and at times felt incomplete. Just as you were getting into some of the songs they faded out and the next track started. This was a disappointment as the music itself is top notch, but with the run time of a number of songs and the whole release in its entirety coming in at around twenty-seven minutes, it made me a little confused. Part of me was saying ‘is that it?’ while the other part of me was saying ‘I want more’.
- ‘From The Void To Existence’ is released next Friday (17 July). You can get your copy HERE.
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