Progarchives, the progressive rock ultimate discography
Edge Of Sanity - Crimson II CD (album) cover

CRIMSON II

Edge Of Sanity

 

Tech/Extreme Prog Metal

3.69 | 123 ratings

From Progarchives.com, the ultimate progressive rock music website

J-Man
Prog Reviewer
4 stars Fully deserving of the title Crimson Part II!

When people talk about "sequel" albums, they don't usually talk about them in a nice way. Too often the band has just run out of ideas, and tries to relive the success of an earlier album of theirs by making a continuation of it. Queensr˙che's Operation: Mindcrime II was a perfect example of this. They followed up their most successful album, so that suckers like me would buy it. Needless to say, I wasn't very impressed.

Edge of Sanity followed up their most successful album, Crimson, with this album. Crimson is in my top 10 albums of all time, it is regarded as THE Swedish death metal album, and is a highlight of the progressive metal and death metal genres. How can you possibly follow up such an album? Well, Dan Swanö proved it possible with Crimson II!

At this point, Edge of Sanity was no longer a band, but more so a Dan Swanö solo project. He essentially does everything on this album, with little help from other musicians. To be honest, I much prefer this album to the other Edge of Sanity albums (except for Crimson) because it shows Dan's full capabilities. There were so many times on many EoS albums where it's clear the other band mates were holding him back. Not that I have anything against them- they're all great musicians- but this shows that Swanö was what made the band great. The fact that one man can write such incredible music, is advanced on all of these instruments, and is an excellent vocalist just blows me away.

The music played on this album is much different from anything Edge of Sanity has produced in the past. Their style was Swedish melodic death metal with many progressive overtones in the past. This album drops most of the death metal influence, and is pretty much pure progressive metal. In addition to being epic in length (similar to the first Crimson album), this features much more keyboards than any previous Edge of Sanity albums. This is filled with excellent synth playing especially, and it shows how talented Swanö is on the keyboards. This is also exceptionally melodic for one of Swanö's more extreme projects. If you've heard his Moontower album, this is in a similar vein. Melodic progressive metal with heavy use of keyboards and death metal vocals. This is heavier than Moontower, as it contains some crushing riffs, but for the most part those 2 albums go hand in hand. I should mention that this album is much better, though.

Being that this album only contains one song, I will not do my usual track-by-track review. This album has also been released with different track listings. One version has 9 tracks, one version has 44, and you can find versions online with one continuous 43-minute track. For that reason, I will not explain every track like I usually do. Just think of this album as one track, because essentially that's how it's meant to be listened to.

Conclusion:

Crimson II is a superb album by one of my favorite musicians. Dan Swanö really pulled off a great album here, and it is one of my favorites in his massive discography. If you're interested in heavy prog metal, this is absolutely essential. I was in consideration of giving this a 5 star rating, but since I gave Crimson a 5, and this is a bit more flawed, I'm going to go with a 4. Still, this is an essential prog-metal album. If you already have Crimson, this should be your next venture into Edge of Sanity, as well as Purgatory Afterglow and The Spectral Sorrows. HIGHLY recommended!

4 stars.

J-Man | 4/5 |

MEMBERS LOGIN ZONE

As a registered member (register here if not), you can post rating/reviews (& edit later), comments reviews and submit new albums.

You are not logged, please complete authentication before continuing (use forum credentials).

Forum user
Forum password

Share this EDGE OF SANITY review

Social review comments () BETA







Review related links

Copyright Prog Archives, All rights reserved. | Legal Notice | Privacy Policy | Advertise | RSS + syndications

Other sites in the MAC network: JazzMusicArchives.com — jazz music reviews and archives | MetalMusicArchives.com — metal music reviews and archives

Donate monthly and keep PA fast-loading and ad-free forever.