Released By : Progressive Promotions Records
Genre : Progressive Rock, Rock Opera
Links : www.flamingrow.de
Tracklist:
01. Elinoire’s Theme
02. Initiation Fugato
03. Overture
04. First Day
05. Nightingales Chirp
06. Do You Like Country Grandpa ?
07. Lea’s Delivery
08. Elinoire
09. Rage Of Despair
10. Adam’s Theme
11. Neclected Garden
12. Time Mirror
13. Watershed
14. Review
15. Unearth The Truth
16. Father’s Theme
17. Farewell
18. A Place To Review Your Soul
FLAMING ROW is a newly formed international project band that call Germany their home base, well some of the members anyway…. See, this project includes around forty different artists from around the globe all contributing in one way or another, similar to something you would see done in the AYREON project release or something like that. Spearheading this project is Martin Schella, who some of you might now from his role in STEEL PROTECTOR or maybe even CAST IN SILENCE but he is joined here with a massive cast of people, some who are largely unknowns and a few surprisingly high profile guests too, like Gary Wehrkamp and Brendt Allman both from SHADOW GALLERY, Billy Sherwood from YES and SPOCK’S BEARD occasional member Jimmy Keegan.
The project’s first album ELINORE is a concept album in all senses and also shares plenty of likenesses to some of the moe monstrous rock and metal operas that we have had over the last decade or so too. This in itself does present a few small problems though… For starters there’s just a little bit too much variation in a stylistical sense, going from QUEEN-esque pomp rock sections to soft pop music and then from there all the way to a more modern metalcore sound and back again. Sometimes in a progressive music release this sort of wide variation can be seen as a good thing but to me, when there is an arcing storyline involved there needs to be a bit more cohesion to help you get lost in the world that the artist is attempting to create. The other problem I found with such a mass variation was that some sections sounded like they were produced better than others… For example the intro track features multiple voices overlapping each other and really does a haunting fell to it production wise, but when you get to the heavier sections of the album it all feels a little muddy, which once again makes it difficult to really get sucked in to the world created.
With those niggles out of the way though, let me tell you about a few of the more positive points I found during my time with ELINOIRE. For starters, the storyline here is bloody awesome…. The basics of it is that it’s about a man who blames his young daughter for the dead of his wife as she died during birth unexpectedly. Yes, there is much more to it than that, with enough twist and turns to be worthy of a novelization but I don’t want to spoil it for anybody so I’ll just leave it at that. The other element of this release that I was very impressed with was some of the amazing vocals found throughout…. I can’t quite remember exactly who was responsible for each part but as a whole the singing here is pretty excellent.
Fans of large project releases like AYREON and AVANTASIA should really take a look at this new release from FLAMING ROW… It’s certainly not perfect, but there is enough high quality here to warrant some serious interest. For me personally I would have really like the production to have been a bit more dynamic and the song styles to be a little more consistent, but I still really enjoyed following this interesting story and would definitely be interested to hear anything that this group may try their hand at in the future.
Written By ZeeZee
Rating : 8/10
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