Amberian Dawn are back with their latest offering Innuendo and whilst it does have some good tracks, it’s a very hit-or-miss piece and doesn’t tread any new ground for the outfit.
Rather than be a bit more adventurous and experiment a little more, Innuendo follows the same tired old path that the band has been collectively following since its inception and for a long-term fan, it feels like a bit of a cop-out. There’s some great tracks on the album, such as the earworm of a track The Court Of Mirror Hall which features a brilliant repeating melody that gets presented to the listener both on the instruments and vocals, and you’ll find yourself humming along to it for days afterwards. Another good inclusion is Symphony nr 1, part 1 – The Witchcraft, which sees frontwoman Capri give a versatile and powerful vocal performance, with her voice evolving for each individual section of the track.
However, for each good track, it feels like there is a much weaker one. Immediately following the aforementioned Court Of Follow Hall is a dull and uninspiring softer track, Angelique, where nothing stands out about the song, and Chamber Of Dreadful Dreams sounds like it could be a massive epic but ultimately falls flat – the big instrumental sections aren’t all that striking and the vocal line almost sounds like it could belong to a different track entirely.
As mentioned earlier, it certainly isn’t all bad. However on the other hand, on Innuendo there’s nothing that hasn’t been done before on so it subsequently plays out as a rather disappointing piece due to it not really featuring anything new.
5/10
