From the land of Hrvatska comes Dreamborn. Roaming the musical landscape where Dreamtheater, Ayreon and Nightwish harvest for ideas, this Croatian metalquartet delivers with Seven Deadly Sins an album that is every way as convincing as the listener - familiair with the names mentioned above - can wish for. Dreamborn is about good music, a welcome reminder of the times that predate the born of nu-metal (think Iron Maiden & Helloween). (Don't get me wrong, I love Faith No More but one joke about Mike Patton comes to mind "with FNM Mike Patton invented nu-metal, with Fantomas he said sorry". One can only keep up so long with Korn and all its incarnations.) Back to the heavy metal that still will be relevant 20 years from now. If Dreamborn will be around by then only time can tell but the kind of music in which they show themselves skilfull & versatile, heavy metal with a strong taste for melody, certainly will.
From the keyboard-intro until The Sign this album is a trip to enjoy for those who want their metal forged along strong melodic lines and founded on tight instrumentation. The cumulative strenght of guitar, bass, keyboards and drums creates a heavy, if somewhat keyboard-loaded, sound in which Dreamborn show themselves solid songwriters. It results in a 40-minute canorous, symphonic metal fest. The drums on the record deserve a special mentioning. Created out of MIDI-samples by Goran Radočaj & Hrvoje Hrženjak (and sounding very organic nevertheless) they give this music an edge and forward-moving-power that's impossible to resist. The vocals from Goran Radočaj are smooth yet powerful - perhaps a bit too smooth to deliver a lyric like "I have killed..." (in the song Seven Deadly Sins). Together with the glorious chorusses (e.g. in Life) it wraps text & music into a fantasy-kind of veil; a depiction of the human condition in an elevated stage where emotions are channeled into a dreamlike kind of state (and when we return from planet Dreamborn, after we woke up, we feel enriched and face the day just so much more easier).
Seven Deadly Sins is 24/7 music (right now I'm having it for breakfast, for all the right reasons, it's a perfect start of the day) and to indulge myself I'm about to give it another spin.
Goran Radočaj - vocals
Ana Radočaj - guitar
Hrvoje Hrženjak - keyboards
Saša Cvitkušić - bass
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