Everon
Flood

They are German, there are four of them, and they play moderate progressive metal.  Their early albums (this is the second, released in 1995, followed by four more) stand out even before being listened to, thanks to beautiful covers and booklets, the inspiration of an artist named Gregorio Bridges. Everon's prog is mildly virtuosic, nothing like the cerebral escapades and choppy rhythms of Dream Theater and the like... let's say we're at the Kansas level. The fact is that the focus is decidedly on the singing and the lyrics, demonstrating that the group leader, namely the composer, guitarist, keyboardist, and singer Oliver Phillips, is primarily interested in singing.

When a guitar solo is needed, he personally takes care of it... as his colleague and full-time guitarist Ralf Jannsen performs only rhythm parts. As for keyboard solos... there are none! Oliver uses them without restraint, but to create thick atmospheric carpets or triumphant sound fanfares, or for arpeggios (on the piano). The frontman has a sufficiently booming and powerful voice to rise above the considerable sonic mayhem (contributed to by bassist Schymy and drummer Christian Moos), though some excessively Teutonic pronunciation flaws inevitably surface here and there.

It's complex music as the genre demands, but song-oriented, with tracks rarely extending beyond four minutes, and if so, never beyond seven/eight. Quite peculiar is the timbre rendering imposed by producer Eroc, a proponent of a very layered and often, indeed, confusing but engaging soundscape, highly reverberated and dramatic: a real wall of sound.

This was supposed to be the album that would establish them, still brimming with youthful energy, in the 1990s international rock scene... unfortunately, the record label they were contracted with went bankrupt shortly after the release of "Flood," with the absurd and depressing result that there were insufficient copies of the album in stores, despite high demand! This was a decisive and unfortunate turning point in their career, still ongoing albeit confined to much narrower horizons than hoped for.

The album starts with a bang: a pair of tracks that represent the same song, first performed with just piano and voice, then seamlessly (except for the track change, of course) the rhythm section explodes, and the themes are reprised, this time with full orchestra and extreme effectiveness. The two tracks are linked in their titles as well, the first being "Under Skies..." and the second "...Of Blue", an extravagance within extravagance; in any case, we are talking about about six total minutes of great progressive rock, pompous and very melodic, powerful and piercing, a lavish calling card for the group, which, however, fails to deliver or even approach the same level throughout the rest of the album, becoming progressively less interesting and, ultimately, quite repetitive.

The album is to be listened to with the booklet in hand, opened to the central page that unfolds into four parts and shows the gigantic porthole of a futuristic submarine, through which the illuminated landscape of a mysterious city, nestled on the abyssal floor, is glimpsed...: typical Northern European fantasies and delusions, for descriptive and intense music, undoubtedly interesting although not without decisive flaws in terms of variety and inspiration.