Band's List Gothic Metal Theatre Of Tragedy Forever Is the World

Theatre of Tragedy was one of the bands that I loved most on the early days mainly because their first 3 albums were really something, with heavy and yet catchy themes, and may I say, a bit ahead of it's time. After those great works the band changed a lot, went electronic with silly lyrics (while they made great lyrics before!) and then after that they lost their iconic vocalist. I got "divorced" of their music on those 2 albums and lost track of the band for some years, but in 2006 they left those electronic horrid influences and recorded "Storm", a reasonable effort. Now the fans can almost forget those terrible years because "Forever Is the World" continues the path of the great "Aegis" - the Gothic sound is back and the band keeps playing catchy tracks BUT... somehow although everything is working really well, it sounds too mechanical, it sounds like they lack ideas and the band gets back to old formulas to do everything really smooth.

Make no mistake, this is a good album, I like some of the songs a lot! "Nine days wonder" is great, "Hollow" must be their best song for ages (really like this one), "Frozen" also a very good ambient track... On the downside I get annoyed with "Astray" (those distorted male vocals get into my nerves) but despite that (and even that!) there are no bad songs on "Forever Is the World", it just gets a bit too smooth.

So this is a work that leaves me with mixed feelings: not a single bad track, some great ones, few not so good... I say that I like it a lot but I also say that it's kind of a "clone" of old ideas with 10 or more years. Will you like it? Yes, probably if you loved "Aegis" this is a work you will definitively like, no you won't like it if you loved their "industrial albums", and maybe maybe, you can like it like me if you loved all their albums until "Aegis" and you understand that "Forever Is the World" sounds good, really good, but it's far from their old masterpieces.