The Hourglass – Through Darkness and Light (2014)

Hailing from Romania, today we have The Hourglass and their majestic Symphonic/Gothic Metal release “Through Darkness and Light”. With countless bands in this genre, it is quite hard to find standout bands and releases, but The Hourglass managed to surface from the pile and claimed our attention for more than several hours – a feat considering the amount of CD’s we review every week.

Avoiding any filler intro track, the band gets down to business with the lush “Dying Star”, a song that is quite dynamic and features some interesting electronic elements thrown into the mix. This track reminds us a bit of a mixture of Nemesea and Edenbridge. The band’s vocalist Alma Vomastek delivers an incredible performance with her excellent vocal talents. As the band delivers bombastic songs like “Rise” and “Away”, our attentions are greatly focused on the ballad “Dare”. In this very dramatic song we greatly appreciate the band’s intricate songwriting skills that perfectly outline every single element in their sound.

Fans of more organic and less overproduced Symphonic Metal will love this release and songs like “Requiem”, “Dies Irae” and “The Fall”, which reminded us of older Symphonic/Gothic Metal from bands like early After Forever and Within Temptation. Reminding us of the Tarja days of Nightwish, pieces like “Madgalene”, “Abandoned” and “In Remembrance”, really help The Hourglass have a timeless and very well influenced sound, but they still have their own signature elements that makes them distinguishable from the rest of copy-cat bands.

Closing with the cheerful “Way Home”, the band’s keyboardist, Ioana Dirva, is clearly a key piece of the band with her countless magical arrangements and very dynamic atmospheric capabilities. As a whole, “Through Darkness and Light” is a very well-crafted release with tons of familiar elements brilliantly assembled into their own style by The Hourglass. If you are tired of all bands sounding the same in the genre, please check out this release and be pleasantly surprised and taken back to the heydays of the genre.

Label: Self-released

Release: March 28th, 2014

Genre: Symphonic/Gothic Metal

Country: Romania