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This album is majestic.
After ten years of success crowned by their spectacular 2013
Retrospect - 10th Anniversary
concert, Epica needed to figure what to do next. The outfit created by Mark Jansen as an offshoot of After Forever in 2002 had significantly changed over time. The constants were Jansen's combining of ambitious ideas with catchy songs, a beauty and the beast singing format skewed in favor of Simone Simons' voice, and keyboardist Coen Janssen's often exquisite hooks. But with an infusion of new blood in 2008, when Epica welcomed guitarist Isaac Delahaye and drummer Ariën van Weesenbeek, both from death metal band God Dethroned, the formula changed and gained a harder edge. The album that followed,
Design Your Universe
, was a defining turn, combining the theatricality of Nightwish, the ease of access of Within Temptation or Delain, without quite abandoning the metal or experimental edge.
In 2012,
Requiem For The Indifferent
followed in the same vein but was less easy to get into. Epica had produced a monster clocking over 70 mn, flirting even more than before with progressive rock and progressive metal. The songs were powerful but to be frank, the whole album was exhausting, requiring a lot of attention for an uneven payoff. Brilliant as it was, RftI had two problems: it sounded over-produced, adding layer upon layer not always obviously needed ; and it did not sound organic, more like the product of gifted musicians working in parallel than the creation of a living band.
With The Quantum Enigma, Epica has made a choice and it pays off. The album is a fusion of the band's two previous incarnations, a perfect blend of its original melodic and theatrical self with its more recent harder edge version. Gone is Sascha Paeth as a producer, even though he is still around, lending a hand, replaced by ex-After Forever keyboardist Joost van den Broek. Gone, too, is the modern age approach of Album-by-Web adopted for RftI, a good amount of that album having been made with the help of internet collaborative work. In contrast, TQE was made in the studio, with all band members collaborating on all the tracks and it shows. Finally, Epica also trusted a new editor/mixer, Jacob Hansen.
The result is immediately audible: the songs go together, flow well into one another. The voices are clearer than before, making the lyrics more easily understandable. And the hooks and riffs don't give the impression to be drowned in layers of salad dressing like on RftI. The melodies are front and center, delicate or anthemic, and memorable. This comes at a cost: TQE is in many ways simpler than its predecessor, abandoning most of Epica's recent progressive temptations although it is not dumbed down : after all, Mark Jansen is still searching for the meaning of life and other small stuff ; In this case, the cutting edge musings of modern science about the articulation of quantum physics and human consciousness in the title track.
But this may be for the best: having coalesced with TQE, Epica can always chose to be more adventurous next time since they have proved it is in their DNA.
The album is heavy on choirs, catchy melodies and orchestrations, announcing the color with opener Originem. TQE is almost as long as its predecessor but flows much more easily. It is split in two, in some way, with an instrumental intermission in the middle (the eastern sounding Fifth Guardian) that sounds more like a standalone track than Epica's usual introductions. For the rest, we have the expectable but almost sing-along "single" track, the infectious Essence of Silence which I find more readily accessible than was Storm the Sorrow ; the Simons/Janssen now traditional metal lied, the stunning The Canvas of Life ; many mid-length songs fusing all things Epica while remaining distinct; and a closing epic, The Quantum Enigma, also labeled as Kingdom of Heaven part II, showing a return to form of Mark Jansen continuing overlapping ideas over multiple albums.
This epic is actually the one song that perplexes me, being only half successful: when it gets going, it works really well. But besides the fact that it could as well have been Design Your Universe part II, thematically, I feel it shows its strings a little too much: the quiet guitar opening like Design Your Universe followed by a slightly gimmicky throat singing reminiscent of Dream Theater's Bridges In The Sky, then by strings clearly evoking Blank Infinity, all the way to a coda that brings back the mild throat singing and a chiming theme vaguely reminiscent of Supertramp's Crime of the Century. Pretty good in fact and majestic enough but on first hearing, it sounds a little too much, musically, like a reshuffling of many familiar ideas.
It is good, though, and everything else is top notch. Most tracks are a perfect blend of power and beauty, always with memorable hooks and melodies without sacrificing the driving edge. Simons has probably never controlled her voice better and the other band members get out of their shells more than before, allowing them to converge onto a rich, unified sound.
After RftI, Epica was at risk of painting itself into a corner despite the maestria of the album. With TQE, they have laid the foundation for the next ten years...
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Yuri Bruni
A beautiful item, worth the high expectations!!
Reviewed in Canada on February 12, 2022
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Hermosa edición
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Luis Ruben
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