Review Summary: improvements galore!
Although Followbane showed some potential in their previous album,
Final Letter From…, they never quite expanded upon it. The screamer wasted his potential by staying in the same vocal range, the drums were too repetitive for their own good, and the songs suffered from a lack of variation. It was a case of what the band didn’t do, and quite surprisingly, we find that Followbane improved quite a bit for
My Solitude.
Despite a strong effort, the album is far from perfect. As before, the music was recorded quite poorly, and although everything is audible, it just doesn’t sound good. The album is a horrendously convoluted mess of sounds, and even with the band being as tight as ever, they sound anything but. To be taken down this many notches by clumsy recording is a tragedy, but it happened. If anything is going to stop you from listening to this, the abysmal sound quality will. However, there are also the screams to consider, which were already lacking to start with, and are somehow more abysmal in this LP (laziness?).
The screams and sound quality could have used adjusting, but almost everything else is amped up in
My Solitude. There is a sense that the band must have been “in the zone” when they were recording the album’s material. It seems as fresh as a newly made sub sandwich, unlike their last sandwich which was used and less appetizing. Songs are well written this time, with the technical guitar work blending effortlessly into the overall sound. When I say the overall sound, I am referring to the band’s melodic death metal style, which incorporates strong symphonic elements. In
Final Letter From, the used symphonic elements were barely noticeable, but in a dramatic switch,
My Solitude employs them extensively. The album has a certain epic, thunderous feeling about it, almost as if the band switched over to Viking metal (which is pretty cool if you ask me). Although the band never hits the epic heights of their magnum opus,
Dead Fantasia, a solid effort was put in, and it shows.
