The Butterfly Effect
Final Conversation Of Kings

Occasionally disconnecting from metal, especially extreme metal, is good. It relaxes the body, mind, and soul.

In fact, in one of my reviews, a comment from a "wayfarer" said to me: "other listens?" suggesting that I only listened to extreme metal (or, worse, only power metal).

Well, I do like metal indeed, and these “The Butterfly Effect” might even fit into the aforementioned category. If it weren't for the fact that the melodies, quite commercial (in the least broad sense of the term), do nothing but "distancing" them from being categorized as outright metalheads.

So get ready to savor the (excellent!) melodies of “Final Conversation Of Kings”, an album that combines a very American-sounding alternative rock (even though the band is entirely Australian), with a tasty progressive rock sound, indie and shoegaze.

This sound blend is, indeed, really spot-on and the songwriting with which the album is imbued does nothing but let the mind travel, in “unexplored” territories, mesmerizing the listener encountering tracks like the opener “Worlds Of Wire”, an excellent calling card that shows what TBE is today: a band with guts that is not afraid to experiment, which has moved away from its primordial sound (that mix of nu-metal and alternative rock “made in the USA”) to offer us wonderful sonic solutions, like the intriguing “The Way”, the hard rockish “Window And Watcher” with very compelling tones, and “In These Hands” which seems to recall U2, delivering a great performance and showing Mr. Bono's band how it's possible to write excellent music, melodic, very inspired but without being flat, boring, and blatantly commercial.

There is no point in getting lost in a track-by-track because to say which one is the “best of the lot” is equivalent to saying heresy. The songs are interconnected with one another, thus giving the impression of being a whole with themselves.

The taste for melodies, the great guitar work by Kurt 'Flirty K' Goedhart, and especially, the golden voice of the excellent Clint Boge (who takes the spotlight throughout the album) does nothing but increase the desire to listen to the songs again, one after the other, from the beginning, over and over.

Because this is “Final Conversation Of Kings”. A simple album, that knows how to grab and captivate you from the very first listen and that manages to enchant with the splendid vocal lines of a remarkable singer who surpasses himself in “Final Conversation”; an album that elegantly closes with the superb “Sum Of 1”, so psychedelic, so distorted and angry in the refrains and, at the same time, so damn melodic.

Simply perfect.

A must-have.