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| The Gathering made their name in progressive metal with their third album, Mandylion, which combined their metal sound with a nicely atmospheric sense and the soaring vocals of Anneke van Giersbergen. This, their fifth, is a sprawling, overambitious double-CD release which removes most of the metal and retains only the less interesting atmospheric sensibilities. The album is very slow, the songs are very samey. It amazes me how the band decided that releasing two discs worth of the same damn material over and over would be a good idea. For the most part, the songs consist of Anneke's voice singing over unobtrusive instrumental work, which gets extremely boring and begins to sound formless after a while. There are hardly any intricate, memorable, or catchy instrumental motives or riffs to be found, and the harmonics and textures aren't interesting enough to hold the songs together either. To make matters worse, Anneke's singing is less effective than it has been in previous albums, and her lyrics aren't exactly tops either. The title track is a condensation of all the album's excesses and failures into a single nearly 30-minute track, only about 8 of which actually consist of listenable music. There are those that say that if this was just a single-CD album, it would be great, that it's just too long for its own good. I disagree - I don't think there are enough interesting ideas in here even for one disc; the only track that even comes close to the quality of the two previous albums is "Great Ocean Road", which admittedly is a very good piece. Sorry guys - better luck next time. review by Brandon Wu — 2-9-00 —
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