Band:	Twilightfall
Album:	The Energy Of Soul
Style:	Thrash metal
Release date:	August 2014

01. The Energy Of Soul
02. Spirit Of Ancestors
03. A Mirror Of Dreams And Reality
04. Welcome To New Day
05. Your Chance
06. Go A Long Way To Each
07. Storm

You see what happens, kids? You see what happens when you've got a lot of wicked-awesome ideas, but just throw them together all willy-nilly?!

Extreme power metal, the whole idea of it is such an appealing thought, but much like putting maple syrup in coffee, the results are rarely as good as it sounds. It's a real shame, because Twilightfall have come so close, yet so far from pulling off an amazing work of that blend. Imagine Sonata Arctica with a few roughed-up edges and some Entombed-style vocals on top. That's what Twilightfall almost sounds like. Neo-classical harmonies balanced out perfectly. Epic guitar leads interwoven with catchy-as-all-hell keyboard licks. The Energy Of Soul even contains a fair amount of variation within the album. The keyboards range from the cheesy, epic power metal sound, to the campy halloween sounds of Dracula doing crack rips. The guitars give you the necessary dose of power-riffage, but also a fair amount of pieced-together influences from Zakk Wylde (amongst other guitar greats). Yup, it's an eclectic, fun, catchy, digestible album. So what's the issue?

It's a jumbled mish-mash. That's the problem.

The Energy Of Soul is a lot of cool ideas loosely strung together, and fired at you in irritatingly fast succession. It's not connected by any intelligent, progressive design, but just held together by the gum and shoelace that is the all-too-frequent guitar solos. Sometimes it's not even a matter of too many ideas per song, individual segments are often muddied by absolute busyness to the point where it's hard to tell what you're listening to. In fact, it doesn't even feel like you're listening to complete songs, but rather a demo-reel of some kind.

Based on its individual parts, The Energy Of Soul could have been downright AMAZING. Piss-poor composition killed this one unfortunately.