Immediately, there’s a sense that Evergrey aren’t messing around. A bit of a drum fill, the main riff of ‘Forever Outsider’ starts pummelling you, the instantly recognisable enigmatic vocals wash in and Evergrey’s 12th full length offering of their illustrious career to date is upon you. No orchestral intros for Evergrey – this is them, unapologetic and belligerent, right here, right now – deal with it.

Vocalist and lyricist Tom Englund sets the scene right from the beginning; “When you talk about the resurrection of the phoenix, that started a mind-game for me. What if the bird doesn’t want to be resurrected? What if it doesn’t want to come back? That sort of resembles things in life; sometimes you get tired of standing up and being strong”. And thus the lyrical journey of “Escape Of The Phoenix” is the bedrock of the album. The emotions, the turmoil, the anxiety, the anger, of the physical world we live in all explored and portrayed using a timeless metaphor. Yes, of course it’s deep – this IS Evergrey.

It’s interesting that when the band emerged back in 1998, they were rather lazily dubbed by reviewers as merely Power Metal (along with other obvious anomalies like Nevermore) until people started to realize there was something different, darker happening here. Dark Power Metal became the term and Dark Progressive Metal seems to now be the preferred description. Fair enough – the band never rely on obvious song structures or tread the path of predictability. Generally, it doesn’t matter what the tag is, every Evergrey album is a perfect way into the band for the uninitiated and of course this newest offering is no exception. Those prepared to go on a somewhat melancholy journey packed with energy, emotion and angst, delivered with unwavering professionalism and unity by a line up stable since their resounding “rebirth” back in 2014 are in for a treat.

Once more those resonating bass-heavy riffs crunch through time after time, song after weighty song, as the music echoes the sentiments of the soul-searching lyrics. There is nothing that stands out for special recognition, nothing that needs attention drawing to it, because as is usually blissfully the case, there’s very little I can pass on to current fans other than to state that all the Evergrey trademarks are as present as we could hope for. There’s no switch in direction, no sideways step, just Evergrey being as Evergrey are. From sombre piano to double-kick driven fury, it’s all crowned perfectly as always by those smooth-as-you-like vocals. This album is an entity, it’s a complete being. Yes, you can pick bits out and they will impress, but savoured as a whole it becomes what it is meant to be. It IS a journey as it always is and always should be with this band – it’s Evergrey.

(9/10 Andy Barker)

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