Trillium – Alloy
December 17th, 2011 by Matt Pietrzak  |
Preamble
Last year one of my favourite albums of the year was the duet album with Michael Kiske and Amanda Somerville. Shortly after the release of the album news about a new project named Trillium arose. It turned out to be a project with herself on vocals accompanied by the musicianship of Sascha Paeth, Michael Rodenberg, and Robert Hunecke-Rizzo. The line-up is very similar to the 2003 metal opera Aina, also written by Amanda.
Review
Alloy initially left me feeling really dissatisfied, sure there were the few tracks that stood out for me right away, but the rest was boring and didn’t really click with me. After listening to it a few more times more songs started growing on me. I ended up listening to the album in its entirety very often rarely skipping any song except for Coward occasionally.
The album can be described by a mix bag of genres, you have some elements of melodic rock, symphonic metal, and just plain old pop music. The album is all over place and doesn’t really stick with a specific style. The heavier songs are the ones which I didn’t really like at first while the slower songs were the ones that I felt really shined right away.
In terms of my favourites there’s quite a bunch. Purge, a song which nicely highlights the vocals of Amanda and has a beautiful vocal interlude. Mistaken, which features a fantastic chorus Scream It, which starts off with some orchestration which is reminiscent of Aina and then the song jumps into Jorn Lande’s duet track with Amanda. The song does a great job of contrasting Jorn’s heavy voice against Amanda’s soft angelic voice. Justifiable Casualty, a nice ballad that seems like a great sing along track. Finally there’s Slow It Down which is more of a traditional pop ballad sounding like Mandy Moore, it is easily the most beautiful song on the album with Amanda pretty much in the spot light as there is very little instrumentation.
The Bottom Line
In the end the album ended up pretty decent. It had to grow on me but once it did I found myself listening to this album constantly. Yes, some tracks are pretty weak and the album doesn’t really have a style that it wants to stick to and it’s kind of all over the place. The album feels like an sampler for Amanda Somerville than anything else. Nether less I enjoyed the album and can’t wait what Amanda Somerville is working on next. (My hope is for Aina Part 2, please Amanda!)