HDK - System_Overload (2009)

HDK is the brain child of Sander Gommans from After Forever fame, so naturally I was very excited about this release. Now that After Forever split-up I’m looking for some band to take their place. Well let me tell you HDK is not that band, while I was impressed by reading all the people that participated in this project: Amanda Sommerville, Andres Matos and Arjen Anthony Lucassen to name a few, this album just does not deliver in my opinion.

This album seems like a composition of random thoughts materialized in music, some parts are really good and some other ones are very bad. The album contains a mixture of genres that becomes annoying after a few songs. I don’t know how people can like this release as a whole, since while there are good parts and some of the guest performances are very good, as a whole it’s just bad.

Overall, in this album we can see that brilliant individual performances cannot overcome a bad idea and mixture of what it appears to be random snipplets of songs incoherently arranged. I would recommend you to pass on this one.

Country: Netherlands