HERITAGE

"Secret Audience" starts quite promissing with some somber synths that set the mood, only to disappear after a short while and be replaced by lifeless synth pads. A mandolin shows up occasionally to lighten up the song and it continues like that repeatedly for a while. All of a sudden aggressive synths and horribly dated drums appear to awake me. We get synth and guitar solos back and forth and the drum pattern is annoyingly repeated for a long time. After that there's "Reprisal", a useless reprise of the previous theme.

"Torquemada" begins with sounds that remind of Hyperborea but after a few seconds there are repetitive drums again, and much faster this time. Fortunately it has nice melodies and the acoustic guitar solo is quite good.

"Lethal Dose" is gladly more atmospheric. Although nice for a while, at some point its lack of direction is noticeable. It ends with a really good guitar solo, but it's too late to save the album.

Summarizing: very few and completely different ideas with barely no atmosphere, all thrown together. Certainly not the best place to start with this band.

1.5 stars rounded up because of the cover, probably their coolest.