OUTSKIRTS OF REALITY

Moonlight Circus are a band from Treviso (Italy) born from the ashes of other bands (Black Jester, Helreidh). As they wrote on their website, this album "can be described as a combination of songs of different tastes and genres, inside the landscape of progressive metal". The main influences are Dream Theater, Queensryche, Helloween, but here, in my opinion, the band was "too much influenced" and the results are not outstanding.

After the short instrumental intro "Nightfall" comes the weak "Silver Surfer", just a power metal track with awful vocals (on the verse "Forever fly, lonely herald, fly lonely lonely lonely lonely herald fly" the singer, in my opinion, seems an annoying imitation of Robert Plant!). "I am twisting in the night / With all my fears and doubts inside / Here's the anguish coming once again. Inside this room my soul burns / Inside this room the fear / Inside this room the past returns." : the "claustrophobic" and dilated "Two Shadows" is a little bit better, with a good interaction between guitar and keyboards. "Whirls of the Past", "Ballad for a Falling Star" and "July Days" are not bad but absolutely nothing special. The last track, the long and complex "Outskirts of Reality", for me is the best track on this album, with many changes of rhythm and a nice guitar work.

In the whole "Outskirts of Reality is a good album, though not an essential one. The most evident flaws here are in the vocal parts. Probably for Moonlight Circus it would be better try to sing in Italian and put the translation of the lyrics in the booklet than to insist in singing in English with a bad accent and in an almost unnatural way.