Year: 2019
Total Time: 39:01
Label: M-Theory Audio

   In January 2017, VINTERSEA released their first sixty-minute work entitled “The Gravity Of Fall”. An album that made an impression because of the various metal genres it mixed and blended into it. Now with “Illuminated”, they continue walking the same path, except that the total duration here is reduced by 20 whole minutes.

   Inside this album, one can hear Black Metal, Death Metal, MeloDeath, Progressive, Post-Rock, even Jazz influences with the use of saxophone in the track entitled “Crack Of Light”. If one excludes the fact that this nearly 40 minute album contains only six tracks, the music is extremely complex and constantly “jumps” from one genre to another. This is a clearly Progressive Metal band, though sometimes putting a label doesn’t matter at all.

   The music, the production, the vocals, the high class and melodic guitar solos, the technical abilities of the band, are all there. Avienne Kiuttu’s singing is fantastic and it is impossible not to make a special reference to this beautiful female presence in the band. Avienne can really sing in whatever style a person can imagine, from melodic or operatic vocals to Βlack Metal screams and Death Metal growls.

   The million dollar question now is this: “Can VINTERSEA manage to get this whole thing blend together?” It’s not the easiest thing to do. At some points, this album seems to suffer from inconsistency. Not so much within the songs themselves, which flow smoothly, but sometimes in transitions from piece to piece, which do not always give the same good flow as the songs themselves. But in general, the effort is good enough.

   “Illuminated” should certainly interest listeners who are looking to listen to more diverse albums, more in the path of the progressive genre, and certainly those who have no problem listening to light jazz, or post rock even up to black metal. The rating may seem a bit high to some, but given that the production is awesome, the music is there, the vocals are awesome, and even though sometimes it all seems to be unrelated, we have to admit that the whole project has a huge difficulty, and VINTERSEA manage to do this just fine, and maybe even more than that.

Rating: 7/10
Editor: George Kourou
Related Link: Vintersea – Official Page