Band
Lanfear
Title
The Art Effect
Type
LP/EP
Company
Massacre
YOR
2003
Style
Power
Popular Reviews
Lanfear - The Art Effect - 2003 - Reviewed by Nailer
Track Listing1 - Heresy 2 - Stigmatized 3 - Traces Of Infinity 4 - The Artefact 5 - Conscience Inc. 6 - Deeper 7 - Beneath It All 8 - Fortune Lies Within 9 - V.o.a.t 10 - The Spell 11 - Regression
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With their 2003 release on Massacre Records, Lanfear's "The Art Effect" rides the line between complex power metal and progressive. I probably wouldn't have found this band if it wasn't for a game called Unreal 2003. It's a first-person shooter style game where you run around different maps blasting each other.
One of the custom maps we got off of the 'Net just happened to have a Lanfear song as the background music. It's pretty fun to be flying between buildings blasting each other with kick-ass weaponry while some powerhouse music plays. It went well with the game because the violence on screen was a counterbalance to the musically serious prose.
Vocals from Tobias "Neo" Althammer are fairly clean with a mid-pitch range and the guitar melodies are consistently well done. It has the velocity in the riffs of most of the speed metal bands, but it's also precision metal with all the notes falling in perfect order making it a bit more mathematical than emotional. It's easy to listen to, but the riffs really don't stand apart from each other.
Lanfear should be easy for fans of groups like Fates Warning to handle.
Bottom Line: Good, complex power metal, but a little tight in the drawers.
--Nailer 11.26.03