To-Mera
Delusions

Listening to this second album would require an extraordinary effort, especially now that To-Mera has produced a work from which they demand a lot from true music experts and their ever-growing number of fans who are gradually learning to know them better.

It would be pointless to try to make you understand that To-Mera has really put in their all this time, and in return, as noticed in their latest concerts and particularly in this latest work, they have asked listeners for elevated patience, pure devotion, and unconditional open-mindedness. A distracted listener could never perceive what the band wants to convey, especially because, if we're not careful, we might notice that at some moments in a song, everything might seem to overflow into one of those completely disjointed and self-serving setups, when in fact it is not. It's a band that requires a certain understanding, certainly different from many other groups that, in recent times, produce the same genre. It's a group you could come to hate fiercely or idolize to the nth degree; trust me, the boundary at this point is much thinner than a strand of wool.

The band’s true inclinations begin to emerge from the first track "The Lie", in which you feel immersed in a bottomless abyss where there's a dire need, even for just an instant, to place your feet, a dream made possible thanks to a superb blend of blast beats, jazzy interludes, progressive setting, guitar work at the thrash boundary and following the punctual and truly unexpected insertion of Gothic-style apocalyptic warblings that inject a total atmosphere of subtle influences of purely neoclassical/Malmsteenian origin. The album's pace after "The Lie" becomes faster, dreamy, adventurous and purely enveloping, shifting from the turbulent and highly technical "Mirage" to the subdued moments of refined meditative reflection in "The Glory of a New Day" and "Inside the Hourglass", until comfortably reaching the central and most imposing track of the entire work "A Sorrow To Kill", an eight-minute piece with intensely dreamlike characteristics, enriched by an arrangement studied in the minutest detail and enhanced by a production work of utmost value and quality that is incredibly remarkable.

"Asylum", mechanical in its progression, might appear to the ear as the ideal watershed between the first and second parts of the disc, in which it harnesses the experience conceived by Symphony X/Opeth, yet remains more intimate, oriental, and surrounded by the fullest trepidation, with the progressive/Goth vein that fundamentally hovered in the initial part of the album. "Fallen from Grace", with very innovative effects and appreciable breaks, might seem very different and perhaps more marked compared to the other pieces of the album, but that doesn't mean that this sole smudge should compromise a work that, in my view, deserves a lot. "Temptation", the last track of this magnificent work, aims to close these refined, pleasingly crafted dances in the best possible way with the use of a gentle piano that delights in its romantic progression, in its fruitful and highly classical manner that can captivate even a non-expert of the genre.

A solid group, convincing, technically endowed with a quality that sends shivers down our spines, and which has significantly improved a production with this latest work that already abundantly excelled at the time of their first full-length "Transcendental". An album that requires attentive listening and draws the listener into a sensual and adventurous whirlpool of highly refined and engaging melodies. Recommended to all those who make progressive metal/rock their existential reason and who will adore this "Delusions" more than they can imagine.

Progressive revelation of the twenty-first century.