The album was recorded and mastered in Devasoundz studios for the guitars, vocals and drums, and Smecky studios was used for the Orchestra since moving the whole Prague Philharmonic Orchestra to Greece would’ve been too much of a hassle.
“Christos Antoniou” destroyed expectations when with the album’s marvelous orchestration; each track has its own feel and sound. From the dramatic moments in the middle of the tracks to the lead guitar and violin duets. Then there are the bonus orchestral pieces, I’m not that good at judging classical music as I don’t listen to it that often (even though I love it) but these tracks just blew me away, each track was full of emotion and said a story of its own.
Now to the band’s music; I have to say that I loved it, the guitars were given an extra blackened sound that classifying this album as blackened symphonic death metal won’t be completely wrong but it wouldn’t be exactly practical. The guitars sound extra distorted most of the time in order to achieve that sound and the bass lines were out of this world, and unlike most death metal bands, I can actually hear the bass in the mix! The drums were extremely fitting and insanely fast when needed as “Fotis Benardo”, Septicflesh‘s previous drummer made sure his pedals were as smooth and as fast as possible to unleash his full potential, and the tone was perfectly fitting. The vocals were as great as always, with “Sotiris Vayenas” giving his beautiful clean vocals and “Spiros ‘Seth’ Antoniou” with his death growls set to 11.
The album has 10 tracks with 5 bonus tracks for the deluxe edition. The 5 bonus tracks are the orchestral pieces mentioned above, here’s the track list:
1. War in Heaven
2.Burn
3.Order of Dracul
4.Prototype
5.Dogma
6.Prometheus
7.Titan
8.Confessions of a Serial Killer
9.Ground Zero
10. The First Immortal
Bonus tracks:
11.Dogma of Prometheus (Orchestral)
12.A prototype in Heaven (Orchestral)
13.The first immortal (Orchestral)
14.Order of a Serial Killer (Orchestral)
15.The Burning (Orchestral)
My overall opinion has to be that this is a really solid album and my favorite of 2014 with Behemoth‘s The Satanist coming really close. My only complaint has to be with the mixing as the vocals are sometimes too low in the mix and I can’t hear the lyrics. Other than that it’s a great album and is one of my all time favorites. Even one of the album’s artworks is my phone’s background.
Edited by: NJ Bakr
