Pure Reason Revolution: ‘Amor Vincit Omnia’
Progressive-rock is an art-form rarely done to any degree of success, it often drifts off onto levels of pretentiousness that would be more suited to the art world. However Pure Reason Revolution have managed to avoid this with their second album 'Amore Vincit Omnia', an album that brilliantly fuses together prog-rock with dance beats.
What makes Amore Vincit Omnia such a joy to listen to, and an album that requires repeat listening is the fact that the songs are so complex. Furthermore it is obvious a lot of thought and attention has gone into producing every single track.
The album opens with 'Les Malheurs', a track that opens with a brilliant angular guitar riff before being followed up by a heavy dance beat and some heavy chord based synth sounds.
The highlight of the album is 'Trilogy', a six minute masterpiece in 3 ‘movements’. A song that starts mellow yet by its third part is a piece of loud melodic rock euphoria. The song takes the listener on a journey through a variety of musical genres and delivers an extremely satisfying listening experience.
No doubt comparisons will be made about some of their vocals, the harmonies used do in some tracks such as 'The Gloaming' evoke memories of Muse songs such as 'Knights of Cydonia'. However the band has enough uniqueness about them that it is easy to ignore this minor fault.
The bands more dance heavy side is allowed to shine on robotic-voice driven track 'Disconnect'. A song that resembles Daft Punk so much that it’s hard to believe they didn’t digest their entire back catalogue before recording it. The band however makes it their own with a beautiful three-part harmony that emanates through out the song and weaves in and out of the robotic voice.
The band make face criticism over the album being to over-produced in some area , and in some part they are right to criticize. However the album for the majority has a very grand sound that would be lost if poorly produced. 'Amor Vincit Omnia' may not be perfect however it is a very solid album that has survived the ‘second album syndrome’ and thoroughly deserves repeated listens.
Words: Kevin Angel
Posts: 2
Reply #1 on : Wed July 13, 2011, 08:22:35
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Posts: 2
Reply #2 on : Wed July 13, 2011, 18:47:35