WITHIN

I was heavily into prog metal of the softer kind at the time of this album´s release. Being from Denmark myself, a country not known for making much good music, I was thrilled to find that a danish band had made a progressive metal album. There is just one thing with this album though. It has folk leanings, and I´m not too happy with folk.

This is in fact more of a power metal album in my ears than a prog one. The lyrical themes underline this, being in the fantasy style. There is not much of interest for me here, as most of the songs are not that well composed, and the sound quality is just awful. One of the worst productions I have ever heard.

Main songwriter and band leader Erik Ravn has listened to a lot of Yngwie Malmsteen and it shines through in his guitarplaying. It´s so clearly a Fender he plays throughout the album.

As mentioned above the songs are not that well composed, but does have a lot of different parts and riffs, and therefore qualifying for prog archives. I have almost had this album for 10 years and only one song stand out from the rest: "To Great Thy Gift". This song defies bad sound quality and delivers the best chorus I have ever heard in a power metal song, which is quite the achivement. If you ever get the chance to hear this album, go straight for "To Great Thy Gift" and listen to that beautiful chorus. I sometimes take out this album just to listen to this chorus.

I´ll give this album 2 stars, only because of the beautiful chorus in "To Great Thy Gift". This might even be too much because frankly the rest of the album is only worth 1 star. I haven´t listened to the next albums from the band, but I´ve read that they should be much better.