You may be an optimistic dreamer, you may believe that our fate is written in stone and there is nothing we can do to fix it, you may believe that it is God who decides, but there are moments in this life in which each one of us (you can accept it or not), wonder why we are here, or if it worths the pain, or if we are being manipulated, or if we’re doing something wrong, and the list goes on an on. So when I listened to the new Solisia’s album for the first time, it let all my senses impressively awake. I looked through the window and asked myself: Where the hell are we going? This album is so powerful that it just woke me up from my usual dumbness and forced me to see beyond. This is definitely an aggressive wake up call.
Solisia is an Italian progressive / power / melodic symphonic metal band formed in Rome in 2006. They debuted in 2007 with a demo of 4 songs called “The film of my life”, and then in 2010 they released “Ordinary Fate”, their debut full length album. The band quickly gained loyal fans since their first material was published, and now with a brand new singer and through Scarlet Records, they bring us a much more mature, intelligent and rich material, an a renewed energetic sound .
I really didn’t wanted to go song by song this time, because Universeasons, for me, was full of surprises, and I think I can ruin a little the magic if I’m telling you what will happen in your brains all the time. So I will give you a general idea of what these surprises made me feel. One of the most striking things in this album is the voice of the new singer Elie Syrelia. I spent a long time sitting on my couch trying to compare her voice and singing style with all the other singers in the metal scene and I finally gave up. She’s certainly one of a kind, not operatic, not a Bruce Dickinson’s impersonator, not raspy, not aggressive. Elie has an enviable vocal control, huge range, a beautiful and stunning vibrato and an amazing and fluid versatility that made me wonder if it really was the same person. Best of all is her interpretation. Her singing style is a mixture of all the singing styles I’ve heard but she doesn’t sounds like anybody else. She can go from Snow White to the Evil Witch, and moves from a very high note to a dark low note in no time. Thanks to this wonderful singer, Solisia’s music acquires a new spirit in this album, and the powerful guitar of Gianluca Quinto, along with the bass of Andrea Arcangeli (DGM), the great work of the drummer Marcantonio Quinto and the magical keyboards of Wilson di Geso, offer us powerful symphonies, almost daunting, that challenge the ear and sweat a cruel reality. From the first track to the last, Universeasons brings a very rich and complex style, centered in progressive and symphonic metal, with riffs that are concordant sometimes but they are never repetitive, we find significant variations, many influences , a touch of industrial, soft intros and heavy outros, and vice versa. Even a clever and short ode to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Phantom of the Opera” is disguised on the song “All I Want”. Some songs begin with a determined atmosphere and ends with another completely different, and the tracks are made to be irresistibly addictive and flow easy one after another, they’re designed especially to stimulate our senses, through the music, and through the lyrics, full of the classic unanswered questions that we all have, and the unique vision of the band about the condition of the human race and the behavior of the average man on the actual society.
So I’ll make it easier for you. This is a unique album, rich in technique, influences, and lyrics that can give you goose bumps and a big knot on the throat (truth hurts, it always hurts), the voice as I said before, is hard to find out there, and the band in general, although it fits in the category of Female Fronted Metal, brings new proposals, challenging to any ear. So if you are looking for a clone of Lacuna Coil, Epica or Nightwish, you are in the wrong place. This is an album for the brave ones, for those who don’t have strict boundaries about musical genre and subgenre, and for the ones that just listen with an open mind and an open heart what the music has to offer them. A great album for those fans looking for great voices, majestic riffs, musical power and new sensations.
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