Arch/Mattheos - Winter Ethereal

Oh wow, i was not expecting Winter Ethereal by Arch/Mattheos to be anything in particular, but Vermillion Moons pummeled my eardrums like Dio wandered through the wrong door in B-Space and ended up at a Queensrych gig instead of his own. 

I guess it shouldn't be surprising, it's John Arch and Jim Matheos and the rest of the current Fates Warning lineup, and therefore basically an incestuous Fates Warning album without all the corporate/emotional baggage of an actual Fates Warning album. But, and i can't stress this enough, it's 2019 not 1985, so aesthetically speaking it sounds really freakin' good as opposed to being recorded in an Airstream Travel Trailer.

That's not really a fair comparison, but it really does take some brain reformatting to jump around among the various generations of recording equipment. If you're accustomed to now music, old stuff sounds like the reverb chamber was an empty green bean can, but once you get back into that sonic world new stuff sounds 40 decibles too loud and more like a triple stuffed oreo (crispy wafers on top and bottom with a completely ill advised amount of sugary goop in the middle). Don't be mad, no one can win the EQ war of doom; you have to take everything on its own terms.

The terms of Winter Etheral are clearly High Fantasy through mythological tinted glasses. John Arch is extremely verbose, and decidedly Romantic in his approach to the modern mundanities of life. Pitch Black Prism is about the ghost of a dancer who apparently haunts the forest around Chernobyl, and that's the most straightforward song on the whole album. Tethered is a love song from a man to his dead wife, but damn he sure wants to fast forward to the part where he's dead too and up in heaven with her, but he keeps waking up 'cause the universe is wrath personified. 

Amazing album, if Edgar Allen Poe had lived long enough to have any idea what a telephone is, he'd have used it to tell his friends how awesomely macabre and depressingly flamboyant this album is. Seriously, next time you're in the mood to walk through the wreckage left by a Disney villain's opening of the second seal of Armageddon, give Winter Ethereal a spin. I guarantee you won't be sorry.