Redemption
I Am the Storm

The Redemption are back, with their vigorous and dark prog-metal, yet true to rather classic styles, once again with the voice of Tom Englund, now the stable replacement for Ray Alder.

They are another one of those bands from which nothing particularly new is expected, except for a solid reaffirmation. The album released in 2018 brought back some of the power that had been lost along the way and was certainly better than the two previous albums. Here we are again after 5 years talking about "I Am the Storm," the eighth studio album by Redemption.

Title and cover are perfectly fitting. A street flooded by a storm, a black man gathering lightning and discharging it down the street, shattering the windows of the houses. The feeling perceived when listening is precisely that of a perfect storm; playing it at high volume during a downpour is not a bad idea at all. Its frantic rhythms, sharp and disorienting guitars, and gray and gothic keyboards seem to want to recreate precisely that disturbed atmosphere, a long and well-organized tornado. This spirit is maintained more or less throughout the duration, but there are moments when the storm seems to calm down and some timid clearing is glimpsed, though it is short-lived, before a new load of clouds is ready to unleash on the listener. In short, they wanted to create the quintessential stormy album and they succeeded. But to what extent? Because described like this it seems like a masterpiece, yet there are several flaws, even obvious ones.

Personally, I divide the tracks by type (a fairly common practice in my analysis work). We have two purely metal ones, very direct and sharp, the opening title-track and "Resilience", of the two, the most worthy is undoubtedly the first because it is the most powerful and clear since "Snowfall on Judgment Day", it mistreats the guitars in a different way but does so without mercy, as we would like Redemption to play almost always.

Then we have the three longer tracks, where the band can indulge a bit more and well expand the sound and rhythmic spectrum. They more often feature slow and nocturnal parts and orchestral openings but also too many, too many solos. The 12-minute composition "All This Time (and Not Enough)" is certainly the most accomplished, the most dynamic, where there is a great ease moving from metal gallops to piano escapes, from pure prog-metal Dream Theater-esque scales to bass slapping; while the 14-minute "Action at a Distance" seems artificially elongated, it is undoubtedly one of the most accomplished, it has beautiful Hollywood soundtrack openings but also too many things repeated endlessly without need; but even the 8-minute "Remember the Dawn" seems to have some excess embellishments.

Absolutely perfect, however, is "The Emotional Depiction of Light," the melodic track of the album, which probably represents the calm, the truce in the storm, it impresses with its gray tranquility and even when it rises in intensity it maintains that sense of calm unrest. "Seven Minutes from Sunset" is instead the track that summarizes everything, concentrating in a few minutes.

There is also a remix of "The Emotional Depiction of Light" but it is blatantly unnecessary, I even allow myself the presumption to say that it should be skipped without discussion, it's hard to understand what purpose it serves and what it actually adds to the standard version, I didn’t think anything could be more unnecessary than the second version of "We Care a Lot" by Faith No More.

And then there are two really not bad covers. As a non-lover of covers to complete an album of originals (but in general, I'm not exactly a promoter of appropriating someone else’s track) I thought it would be hard to endure even two, but Redemption show themselves adept at reviving others’ tracks under their own sonic umbrella. The moral is: if you have to, at least try to give them your own style. In the previous album, they covered "New Year's Day" by U2 and it wasn't bad even though they mostly just added metal riffs. Here "Turn It On Again" by Genesis is completely redesigned, it really feels like another song, we listen to it in a guise we never would have imagined, a chart-topping track that is surprisingly transformed into a direct and equally stormy gothic metal composition. The cover of "Red Rain" by Peter Gabriel is less sensational and appears less transformed but still makes for a pleasant listen.

The report we've drawn up therefore indicates a solid prog-metal album proud of its classicism, its powerful sound, and its dark atmosphere. However, the flaws are there and deserve their own chapter. For instance, we mentioned too many solos: yes, there are too many solos, especially guitar solos; it's known that solos are a showcase for guitarists, the problem is here they often seem to lack much soul, they are waterfalls of uninspired notes repeated many times, unnecessarily elongating the tracks and giving the idea that they were forcibly inserted to compensate for a lack of ideas, to extend the duration. The drum parts don't fall far behind either: mega-galactic drum rolls repeated every few measures; okay, making the drumming varied, but doing so ends up breaking the rhythm too much and disuniting the track. Wait a moment, this seems like a film I've already seen… yes, yes, "Black Clouds and Silver Linings" by Dream Theater, it’s him, the same solo races, the same excessive drumming, the same dark metal riffs, the same horror and stormy atmosphere. If "I Am the Storm" had been made by Dream Theater, we would have talked about it for quite some time, it would have sparked fierce factional battles on forums and social media. Another flaw that jumps to the ear is once again linked to the production; I don't know what happened after the first four albums, maybe the continuous changes of producer, but the strong point of the early Redemption was precisely that clean and sharp sound, the guitar riffs really overwhelmed you and got under your skin, afterward, they never managed to replicate it and that feeling of too dark and not clear enough recording prevailed.

But let’s avoid asking for the moon, it’s the classic album to listen to while getting involved without too many demands.