Metal Reviews

[Anonymous]

Tell me what you think of it.

Arcturus - Sideshow Symphonies
Space Black Metal (no, not Avant-Garde...)
Season of Mist, 2005
9 tracks, total playing time: 50:33


The long wait is over at last, and the Norwegian Dream Team that is Arcturus has finally brought us another album. Four years after the excellent avant-garde album that was The Sham Mirrors, their fourth effort Sideshow Symphonies is here at last. Allow me to explain, for this isn't a simple dissection.

The first track, Hibernation Sickness Complete, meets my expectations for this album. Quite a nice tune, in which the new vocalist Simen Hestnaes brings his great, if somewhat nasal, clean vocals to bear along with some distorted vocals. A greater emphasis on the guitar work and only sparingly used keyboards set this song apart from Arcturus' previous works, however.
The rest of the album can be discussed in a fairly short manner, namely: it all sounds alike. Painful, eh? It is for me. Perhaps it has something to do with the keyboards playing a much less important role; many of the moments of sheer brilliance in such past songs as Star-Crossed or The Chaos Path were almost exclusively created by the effects of the talented Steinar Sverd Johnsson. But no, this album is ridden with cookie-cutter riffs, an almost uniform sound the songs share, and no keys more imaginative than a Hammond Organ.

True, my expectations were indeed rather astronomically high, but with such excellent past efforts I can't exactly blame myself. It is sad for me to say then that Arcturus have terribly disappointed me with Sideshow Symphonies. To an uninitiated person, this would probably be very interesting and agreable music. To me however, this is a borefest of songs I can still not distinguish after more or less twenty spins. Heck, it sounds more like Ayreon going Black Metal than anything they previously composed. Rests in my mind this question: What were they trying at?

Was Sverd fed up with being in the fore, and did he deliberately take a step back in his songwriting? Did Garm's departure truly have such a great impact on Arcturus? Were they trying to write more aggressive material for live situations (which was actually the reason why Garm left)? Or has the vein of imagination finally bled dry? I'd like to know, really.

60/100

[Misha]

Very interesting review and fun to read, you'd make a great reviewer!!