Evergrey
The Atlantic

“The most powerful, dark, and varied of our career.” This is how Evergrey announced their eleventh work. But let's see if we can truly define it this way.

Evergrey presented themselves to the public until the middle of the last decade with a power metal that was powerful to the right extent and very melodic, with powerful rides but without exaggeration and generally very orchestral accompaniments. Then, however, they began to harden their sound, initially with the rough and immediate “Monday Morning Apocalypse” (perhaps their simplest and most direct work), and then to exaggerate with the very powerful and dark “Torn” but also with the more varied “Glorious Collision”; then a new turn, which led to the current situation, with sharp guitars but not overdone and also new and modern solutions borrowed from contemporary metal trends.

There is agreement that “The Atlantic” is heavier compared to the last two releases. The guitars are prominently in the foreground and sound as sharp as blades, never so cutting. Tracks like “A Silent Arc” (at least the first part), “A Secret Atlantis,” and “This Ocean” are real boulders, crashing to the ground with great impetus, nor do “Weightless” and “Currents” joke at all; the former is practically a kind of “Pull Me Under” by Dream Theater, both for rhythm and for keyboard loops, but with three times the power, try it to believe it. The bass work deserves particular attention, once decidedly in the shadows but now increasingly prominent in the group's compositions; here too, the word “sharp” seems the most suitable, indeed, we are facing an emblematic case because I had never heard such pounding and metallic bass before, we can almost say that this is the album that definitively dispels the common notion of the bass's dubious incisiveness in musical economics; yet that bass, despite pounding, never really wants to take the foreground, it simply blends with the guitars creating that “rotating blade” effect that drags the listener into a real whirlpool. In fact, the choice of the cover and title proves more than ever spot on, when you listen to the album it really feels like being on a vessel in a stormy ocean with sails torn by the wind.

The keyboard work, although in the background, is still of certain importance and offers a good variety between gloomy carpets and piano parts with a slow gait that make the sound rather distressing, anguished, and dark, electronic inserts (evident especially in “The Beacon,” and how can we not mention the synth interlude “The Tidal” that splits the album in two) that strengthen the sound making it even more angular and solos and passages with vaguely neo-prog or classic prog flavors (such as those in “A Secret Atlantis” and “Currents”).

A track that breaks the pressing rhythm, however, is “Departure,” which highlights the melodic side and the voice of Tom Englund, who confirms himself as one of the great voices in circulation (he was even called to replace Ray Alder in Redemption, you decide...), but which paradoxically highlights the metallic sound of the bass more than in any other track and does so without hindering the melodic setting of the piece. More space for melodic openings also in “End of Silence.” The most peculiar track is instead “All I Have,” with its slow and anguished progression and those small guitar roars that give it a rather alternative air, you can almost hear distant echoes of Tool.

In light of all this... is “The Atlantic” really their hardest and most varied work? Personally, I would answer “not exactly,” I think the more powerful and noisy guitar work was presented in 2008 with “Torn,” I believe that is their hardest and darkest record ever, where the keyboards were, among other things, quite suffocated by the guitars themselves, guitars that shot far more oppressive and cavernous riffs than in this latest release; perhaps we could compare it more to “Glorious Collision” because it is tough and varied in sounds, although it was essentially the continuation of the cavernous sound of “Torn;” “The Atlantic” instead seems to be more positioned in the more recent phase of the Swedish band's production, seeming to follow in the footsteps of the previous two albums but with more explicitly extreme sounds (after all, the band itself presented it as the third and final part of a concept already started with the previous two albums). I don't find the album heavier to be correct, perhaps it can be defined as the sharpest, because that is the impression one gets, of a sharp blade. The award for the most varied album instead, I believe, belongs to the 2014 album “Hymns for the Broken,” where we were really tossed from the most modern track to incursions into the old Evergrey style, from the semi-ballad to the extreme track, from the darkest melodies to the brightest ones, all with a certain ease and variety of solutions. In any case, “The Atlantic” is not a copy of any previous album, it is an album comfortably endowed with its identity, Evergrey remains faithful to certain elements but never wants to remake the same album. The band is still confirmed as a brilliant and often underrated reality in metal.