Year : 2013Genre : Progressive Rock with a Power Metal/Folk Metal tint
Label : Zetafactory
Origin : Croatia
Official site : > - here - <
Ivan Mihaljevic & Side Effects is a Croatian act with a pronounced progressive leaning that finds playful and straightforward efficiency at conveying an Iron Maidenesque modal disposition throughout the richly structured, yet elegantly simplistic tracks the album is a healthy dosage of.
The formation shows considerable and admirable level of ripeness in the compositional department : the songs come dressed up in full sonic musculature and their respective blueprints are very easy to spot and appreciate. It really is boiling down to personal tastes and how much of a prisoner your are of you very own tastes, but, if you are into meticulously realized straight-to-the-pathos progressive metal, then these Croatians doubtless demand your attention and you must give it to them lest you want to be missing out on something finely and soulfully realized. Arm your Bard and read on to know more about this.
Effect wizardry is nowhere to be found on the disc - everything is quite organic and competently engineered. The sounds are respecting each other's volumetrics, and the lead singer's voice is especially easy to support with distorted audiomeat, as it conveniently sits in the upper portions of a mid-range singing domain. He packs JUST a little bit of accent, truly just a bit of it, so native English speakers could freely appreciate this music as a product of something of an exotic venue.
The disc packs nice relative anatomical variety throughout, though a tame fixation on a balladistic narrative disposition is clearly observable. The opening track is more of a demonstration of a ripe understanding of modernistic progressive rock mechanics, while the second piece, after striking up a mood similar to "Hey, Joe!", features an especially elegant hook that is safe to be regarded as a peak moment of the sober 48 minutes the album seeks to warrant your fun for.
In the third track, the balladistic approach remains intact - the lead singer's voice is ever-grateful for pathos, which becomes its very saddening limitation/prison with time - yet, now a Rocky theme song-feeling - Eye of the Tiger - is shining through supported by the fragile elegance of '80s spandex metal, that which now is guaranteed to be free from muscular man-sluts and sweat. A relief! This particular track is a great example of how the band seeks out avenues to offer complexity on : everything is very straightforward, yet melodically relevant and unique - no particular attention is devoted to create exciting collisions between harmonies, though. Once again, an Iron Maidenesque feeling is dominant throughout this song, though the exotic undertone later on takes the liberty to border on tainted folk/doom metal. Ah, tainted folk is your best bet to make your music consort to teenpopdjent standards, so have this observation for free if you want to construct a teenpopdjent song every Tool fan will find awesomelucious.
After an acoustic ballad expressed through a Bard narrative - could listen to this anytime in a Skyim pub when contemplating existence in drunk fashion while being buried between unquestionable maid tits - the disc maintains its ripe fixation on the mid-tempo. In this particular track, "Gift Of Life" a solo guitarist addresses his skill level of mimicking the playing style of Yngwie Malmsteen, and Malmsteen nods with the smile of a drunk swashbuckler from the other corner of the Skyrim pub, in other words, Tuesday evening for Skyrim Yngwie.
The track "Time Travel" is an instrumental short, and it is realized pretty nicely. The guitar is more free spirited here, and the structure dares to deviate from the kind-of-fantasy leanings. (About time, too.)
"Eclipse" is a 12 minute Epic that does a great job of complementing the classic methods of progressive silence massacre - on occasion, the band ventures into experimental territory, but they decide to put a limit on the madness and invoke Ballada Pathos Paua one more time, but this is what gives the album an identity. It is worthy of note that this particular track starts out with a competently orchestrated - oops. - orchestra sequence, while its ending is haunting doom metal, which looks and feels particularly fun when it is mocking the pathos of fantasy related powerprog metal.
The track "I am" reeks Bon Jovi/Aerosmith, you know, with the heartwrenching harmonic modulations that makes Elvis the King and you his Biatch. The lead singer's singing though demands recognition in the climax. Everything else in the song is a present for the Skyrim ladies though.
The album is a ripe, serious contribution, which does not afraid of the act of obeying its intended limitations and instead submits to the hard work required to create relevancy within the established boundaries. Do not form your opinion based on the very first track, because said track happens to feature a rhyme pair the album would have looked better without, but my heart is molten gold enough to not tell you which one is that.
Check out this solid, exigent Croation prog metal project here.
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