THE COLD LIGHT OF DARKNESS

Tr3nity's debut is a concept album about a fictitious girl named Cathy and their experiences with child abuse, drugs and crime. The band website tells that Rob Davenport had been inspired to this album by his own experiences with drug.

Nevertheless the band fails somehow to transpose this quite serious topic into the music. let me try to explain why. The songs are most of the time just too much harmonic and quite catchy, i.e. the refrain in the opener "She sees with the eyes of a child..." is as memorable as one of a pop song. Second and third track are showing a very similar style, in "Into the dark" the keyboard sounds like they would try to cover Richard Wagner in highspeed mode. Then in track 4 which has 3 parts there is some stylistic change, but unfortunately not towards an improvement. In the first part we hear a soft and bluesy guitar and I start trying to remember how it sounds like. And after a while the name Chris Rea comes to my mind, a singer and songwriter being quite popular in the 80's. And exactly this is how it sounds like. Part 2 is very floyd-ish, atmospheric and Part 3 is taking up again the theme of part 1 but much slower with guitar play that is quite Gilmour-esque again. According to their website the last track "The Exposure suite" describes Cathy's personality and is divided into 4 parts. Second one whose title "Help me" reminds immediately to Arena ("Cryin' For Help" suite on "Pride") tells the suicidal trial of the girl and is in fact IMHO the most boring one of the album. It should probably reflect the desperation of the child but the effect is rather soporific. The rest of the music is really not more exciting, it's almost a torture to listen a few times all through this album.

As a conclusion "The cold light of darkness" cannot keep what its title is promising, even the cover art is not done very well, not to speak about the music which is showing more cliches of the subgenre than possible and it represents everything else than a good concept album about a serious topic. Sorry to the band, nice trial, I'm giving 2 stars for the effort of the musicians. But I can recommend it only to die-hard NeoProg fans!