Epica, The holographic principle

After the nuisance that their previous album turned out to be, I was determined to stay away from this band. However, I made the mistake or reading and most of all trusting the reviews and gave it a try. I lost an hour of my life, I gained some laughs… I suppose it’s a decent trade in the end. I won’t be repeating the experience any time soon, though, as it seems that Epica fans have a short memory and keep saying that the current album is the best of their career, where they show maturity and creativity and some other stuff they’ve never actually shown, on this album or anywhere else. I expect the next one will also be praised as the peak of their career, just like this one and the previous and the one before that, and it will still be the same pretentious crap that they always put out. Heh…

The album opens up with the single Edge of the blade, which is terribly cheesy and boring and has all the ingredients for a bad Epica track: sweet in the beginning, shrill at the end vocals from Simone, a tractored bass riff that never changes, a recycled obnoxious choir and generally a lot of pompousness. The good news is that this is the worst track of the album. The bad news is that the rest isn’t that much better. After three tracks I was already bored out of my mind, so I made it my new personal mission to discover whether there’s a song on the album that departs from this recipe. There were a few exceptions (which we’ll talk about more later), but mostly I swear they go through a check list when writing their songs.

It all starts with the epic choir, which tricks you into thinking you’re going to listen to a good interesting song. Then it tones down to make room for Simone’s sickeningly sweet airy vocals. Then the irritating loud bass that is always the same except for The holographic principle where probably even they got bored of playing the same riff. Then, noise. Noise in the form of disjointed monotonous grunts that you know are coming from a mile away, noise in the form of that high ringing choir that would be nice if it were used to punctuate instead of being used for minutes in a row in every single song, and finally noise in the form of Simone yelling singing with power in a very strident and exhausting way (after all these years of fronting a pretty big band and lessons from much better singers, you’d figure she’d actually learn something and improve, but she still sounds just as bad, album after album and I can’t figure out why she doesn’t add some grease to that singing of hers or stops singing so high and loud if she can’t handle it; the only explanation I have is that someone lied to her she’s doing good). If we’re lucky, we get a guitar solo because Mark remembered he keeps saying they’re a heavy band.

The cherry on top are the lyrics. I laughed for minutes when I realised that Universal death squad is actually a non-humorous track. I thought for sure it’s tongue in cheek, like Arjen’s Intergalactic space crusader, but I forgot that Epica don’t do jokes and they always take themselves seriously. How they can sing that with a straight face is beyond me, I crack up only when I think of it. A special gold star goes to “on the other side is me, if you turn around you’ll see”. That’s some deep philosophical shit there. Again, I wouldn’t make fun of them if they were a simple band with simple lyrics, not aiming for anything more. But when you position yourself as an erudite and then sing stuff like that, you are setting yourself up for ridicule.  

I mentioned exceptions, and one of them is the mandatory ballad, Once upon a nightmare. It’s nothing special, but the fact that everyone stops yelling for a few minutes (at least for half of the track, in the second half all bets are off) and that there is an actual growth (quite beautiful, to tell the truth) do wonders for my already battered mind. The second exception is Dancing in a hurricane. It started good and I kept waiting for it to go down and… it never did! It was a good, solid song from start to finish, Simone sounded well and with more grease in her voice, they were actually transmitting something about a deep and real issue (not their regular technology will enslave us crap *puts on tinfoil hat*), it had an intense bridge, a real melodic line instead of their general clatter… it actually sounded like a normal track where they give a shit and put soul and interest into it.

If we ignore the exceptions (which we should, because that’s what you do with them), the summary would be too much noise, too many things thrown in there without purpose just because they’re cool, too little musicality and too little emotion. Insipid, uninspiring and worst of all, pretentious as fuck. Maybe I would tolerate their flatness and lack of originality better if I wouldn’t keep getting the vibe that they feel so smart and superior and again, if they would stop telling me to do shit! I’m sorry, I can’t resist, we should “break through the anger”, “break through the perfect state of mind”, “do not try to defy creation”, “abandon fear give in before your mind can never escape”, “look for distraction”, “fight your way out”, “justify your acts”, “seek the mastermind”, “find a way to change our destiny”, “desecrate yourself”, “divide and conquer”, “open your mind”, “live in this moment like there is no past”, “dare to dive and fall” and that’s just the first half. They’re soooo freaking preachy and affected it’s making me roll my eyes. And viceversa, maybe I would tolerate their self-important attitude if the music would be any better. This way, they’re a bunch of snobs who have zero self-awareness and it transpires into the music in a very off-putting way.