What struck me first as I put on An Abstract Illusion‘s Woe is that they seem to want to be both Fallujah and Opeth at the same time. The material has this constant reliance on one guitar being higher pitched to create a sense of tragic beauty and shrill tension. It’s meant to make the songs sound atmospheric while the breakdowns into subdued calmer moments add contrast. What actually happens on this release is that the shrill guitar is overused and ever present in the mix. The songs are dramatic and try to build in waves but utterly fail to do so. This is evident in that I at first thought that track two (“Slaves”) and track three (“Tear Down This Holy Mountain”) were the same song. Together they take up 19 minutes without any standout moments in a surprising feat of overindulgence. With songwriting this uniform you better have a good flow and point to the album but An Abstract Illusion just seem to be one of those bands that only have one mode of writing that they repeat ad nauseam.
“Prosperity” bookends the first half of the album with a calm breakdown that breaks out in a riff that shows just how uniform what came before has been. It builds towards the end of the track but the chugging nature of this riff does nothing to dispel the uniformity of the writing. The absolute nadir of the album comes with “Blomsterkrans” (Crown of Flowers) which features a cheesy piano melody with a spoken word section about how depressing reality is. It’s lazy, clichéd in its expression and childishly weepy in the worst way. Near the end, 14 minute track “In The Heavens Above, You Will Become A Monster” starts out strong with varied playing that shows some promise of what this band could be if they spent more time refining their songwriting. But as you’d expect from a song this long, the track once again goes into a meandering “atmospheric” mode at its midpoint with only clean sung vocals to grab hold of. I can hear the ideas behind the writing here but you could easily cut this song in half to make it be more effective.
Closing things off, the last song features some more reliance on chugging and another calm breakdown where the vocalist tries as hard as he can to mimic Åkerfeldt. These last two songs carry some potential but are overlong and feel like an EP tacked on a stylistically different album. It hurts me having to give out such a low score to something in one of my favorite genres but the problems here are impossible to ignore.
