Band:	To-Mera
Album:	Exile
Style:	Symphonic progressive metal
Release date:	September 2012

01. Inviting The Storm
02. The Illusionist
03. The Descent
04. Deep Inside
05. Broken
06. End Game
07. Surrender
08. All I Am

To-Mera is a bit like a blacksmith's puzzle. It's a challenge to untangle, and it's even a bigger challenge to put it back together. It also appears to have many solutions. It's like a jigsaw that fits together in more ways than one. Exile is a musical puzzle that needs solving in parallel in different dimensions. It appears straightforward, and therefore bland. Turns out, that's just a smokescreen.

The first couple of times I listened to this album I sort of liked it but couldn't help feeling a bit disappointed on the whole. Something didn't feel right about it. In all its complexity Exile seemed somewhat simple and non-appealing. The music had lost its edginess and sharpness which formed the basis of my listening experience with their previous albums. I felt lost and cheated out of a challenge.

I had to sleep on it. Two months ought to do it. As it now turns out, it was the only right decision. I needed a second first impression of the album, a fresh start from the right foot. And all of a sudden, I found myself engrossed in Exile. It unfolded itself leaf by leaf, twist by twist, passage by passage, and song by song. Beneath it all, I found the To-Mera I knew, as well as the To-Mera I didn't know.

By now I love Exile. It's laden with goodness. It might be a bit unevenly distributed across the album but there's always something to wait for. I love the wall of riffs at the beginning of "The Illusionist," a fully developed jazz passage and later contrasting keyboard insanity of "The Descent," the dirty sounding guitar solo on "Deep Inside," the bad-ass riffing on "End Game," also piano and keys complementing the beautiful lead of Julie's voice, and, most of all, the brilliantly playful circus-like salsa passage in "Surrender." And that's only a fraction of it all.

It wasn't incidental that I compared Exile with a jigsaw. There's a ridiculous amount of small excellent bits packed into this album. They're hard to find and easy to miss because they're scattered all over the place, underneath a layer of bigger bits that are also scattered around. It has all been fitted together to make a smooth sounding record. However, I like to think that if I took it all apart and rearranged all those tiny building blocks I'd get another album's worth of good music sounding totally unlike Exile but possibly equally as good. Yes, it has its ups and downs but for what it is, it totally rewards the effort of trying to untangle it.