You might have noticed that I have a routine of genre-tagging bands right in the first paragraph of a review I’m writing, in case my readers aren’t bored enough to go through 300 words describing an album which is not of interest to them. Well, this time you’ll just have to read the review, because this stuff is hard to pigeonhole.

Prominent bass, prominent drums (I quit counting around the sixth drum solo), a guitar player channeling every (positive) cliché in metal guitar, from riffs and guitarmonies laden with Maiden-worship to classic shredding, short appearances of synths/piano and a singer with a gentle, melodious approach take you on a journey through heavy, prog, thrash, and Opethian – or more precisely, Damnation-esque – ballads. Random cameos of other (metal and non-metal) subgenres find their place here as well. The genre-hopping doesn’t take place within songs themselves – each (long!) song is mostly dedicated to one particular “style”.