AWAKEN – Awaken (CD)

American metal band Awaken opens their debut album quite carefully with the instrumental March Of Aachen. Melodic, fine tuned, not in any way offensive. Not the strongest opening I’d say, but still a good song. To be honest I would have ended the album with this one and opened with second track, As The Dark So The Light, a great powerful rocker. This actually brings me back a bit in time and reminds me of long lost bands like Powersurge and Seventhsign, plus a bit of Queensryche from back in the day when they were actually a great band. Singer Glenn DaGrossa however sounds no way like any Geoff Tate wannabe, but he instead has a harsh, gravely great powerful voice, reminding me a bit of Lee Ving (Fear, MD.45) with a touch of Biff Byford. Besides this, Awaken is equipped with two killer guitarists in Joe Todaro and Mike Delon, a bit different in style, but they complete each other really great. There’s some pretty intense and cool flashing soloing going on, I tell you. Furthermore the song material is highly interesting with great variation, nice vocal harmonies, and really good arrangements. Darker riffs, like in Bones To Dust, Death Of Me and Beneath The Surface are mixed with melodic uptempo stuff like The Inquisitor or ending track In This Circle which made me think of Crimson Glory. The soothing ballad My Silent Breath comes in like a breath of fresh air to lighten up the intensity of the album. A great beautiful thing, where Glenn again shows his vocal diversity. A really great album in a genre we don’t hear that often today, but I now realized I actually missed. Get it!
Janne Stark
Label: self-realeased
Year: 2011
Country: 2011
Link: www.myspace.com/officialawaken