Sylvan
Home

Among the releases that have characterized these first months of 2015 and have made several rounds in my player are also Sylvan, the little-known German prog band known to the few for their delicate, emotional, vaguely depressive, and also occasionally angry style. The concept album “Home” comes out 3 years after the pretentious and perhaps overly diluted “Sceneries”.

The judgment I feel like giving this work is the following: it is in any case an excellent album, which confirms the refinement and delicacy typical of the band's sound but is a bit lengthy, and overall, one could have expected a little more.

The melodies are almost always delicate, soft, supported by an equally delicate and sufferable voice… however, there is the impression that upon this extreme delicacy, the band has settled down, and there lacks the greater dynamism that characterized the band's best works; in them, it was much easier to find particularly interesting guitar and keyboard solutions that made the offering more varied and dynamic. Here, there is a bit of mannerism in the guitar parts but also in the choice to focus a bit too much on the piano parts. This does not take away from the fact that there is something intriguing here and there: the brilliant and pompous yet delicate orchestral arrangement of “Not Far From the Sky”, the slow and very soft acoustic arpeggio of “With the Eyes of a Child”, the shining melody of “Shaped Out of Clouds” (with its particular background buzz), and the deep keyboard sounds of “Off Her Hands” while tracks like “Sleep Tight”, “All These Years” (despite the ominous initial bass line), and even the concluding “Home” seem to be fillers.

But luckily there are a couple of tracks that break the mannerism of the other tracks and offer true strokes of genius, raising the album's average. The top is certainly “In Between”, which besides its delicate moments, offers a decisive refrain angrily sung by Marco Glühmann, a more metal part accompanied by a heavy electronic loop on the verge of industrial, a delicate synth solo, and other particular sound rustles. “Point of No Return” also shines with creative light, even more aligned with progressive metal with edgy guitar riffs yet without exaggeration and acid-tuned keyboards well fitted in. In “The Sound of Her World”, one can hear again the soft yet sophisticated guitar touches typical of Sylvan's best productions, while the stroke of genius is represented by the continual "up-and-down" scales of the keyboard accompanying the decisive refrain; passages that could even remind one of Muse in tracks like “Starlight” although obviously, there is not the slightest shade of Muse's stylistic influence. These tracks, as beautiful as they are, make you bite your nails: you immediately wonder what might have been if there were more tracks of this caliber… The “darn” slips out even after hearing “Black and White” (also among the best): after 6 minutes of the usual delicate Marillion-style melody, we have a final minute that is tougher and more lively with truly ingenious “cybernetic” synth sounds that inevitably confuse the listener. The question arises spontaneously: why give so little space to genius ideas? Why is there such a widespread tendency to insert only a handful of genius seconds amidst dozens of minutes of decidedly more standard things? More than anything, I would like to understand if it's a fear of experimentation, an actual lack of ideas, or maybe it's about applying the concept of carpe diem… Really, if they had given more space to some interesting and particular solutions by now, we might even be talking about a masterpiece.

A track that disappoints, however, is the single “Shine”: theoretically, it is the most pop track of the album, with its very simple verse-refrain structure, but that central metal part is somewhat out of place; in truth, it contains interesting keyboard parts but they are also very fleeting, as if they don't exist; it's a section that could have fit, but it needed to be developed better, as it is, it doesn't make much sense to exist, the Dream Theater in the poorly received “A Rite of Passage” did decidedly better, they too inserted an instrumental part scarcely related to the rest of the song in an otherwise fairly commercial track but developed it much better to the point that it didn’t seem useless.

But all these are criticisms because it is part of the role of a critic and music analyst; in the end, I always end up appreciating things for what they are. Criticisms aside, the album nevertheless has an indisputable melodic refinement, and the emotional side has always been a strength of Sylvan, I would say that this is enough to reserve it numerous listens and it will probably end up in my personal top ten of 2015.