Sirenia – The Enigma of Life (2011)

Gothic Metal’s prodigal son Morten Veland returns with yet another great release from his main band Sirenia in the shape of “The Enigma of Life”. As you can imagine, this release is nothing short of bombastic in terms of musical and vocal arrangements. All fans of the band will surely be please in how the band is shaping up and is continuing and improving on their sound since “The 13th Floor”.

Leading the band’s impressive sound we have Ailyn’s angelic vocals that transfer great emotion and sound as good as ever. Having composed and played all instruments in this release Morten knows exactly what fans like and delivers an album that features a somewhat improved Sirenia sound that will haunt your play lists since the moment you start listening to this record.

With “The End of it All”, the band quickly jumps into full-on symphonic mode featuring nice string arrangements and massive keyboards, however, Morten never loses sense of the ‘aggressive’ aspects of his music and features solid guitar riffs, tight drumming and his characteristic growls. The band continues with this style and adds some choirs for “Fallen Angel”, just to jump into some weird (but not bad) electronic style beats on ‘All My Dreams” making this the weirdest song on the album in our opinion.

“This Darkness” and “The Twilight in Your Eyes” feature a very traditional déjà vu-feeling sound to some of the band’s earlier songs, but with Ailyn’s solid vocals and the crushing guitars we can let that go and fully enjoy this powerful songs. Our favorite song has to be “Winter Land”, a powerful ballad-like song that oozes emotions and melodic brilliance.  Rounding up the album we have a hefty mixture of powerful and melancholic songs that have the Sirenia and Morten Veland imprint all over them, giving the fans a total of 55+ minutes of brilliant Gothic Metal music.

Sirenia shows that they are not afraid of not changing many things in their style and that they rather work on perfecting their sound. For us, as long as it’s great, we don’t really care and will buy into the band’s solid releases every time they come out. If you are a fan of the band, you will not be disappointed in one bit about this great album. If you are looking into getting into Gothic Metal, then you are in for a big treat with this solid release from one of the scene’s most proficient musicians.

Release: February 15th, 2011 (USA)

Country: Norway