To-Mera – Transcendental / 2006 Candlelight / 8 Tracks / http://www.to-mera .com / http://www.candlelightrecordsusa.com / Reviewed 11 November 2006

Candlelight has so many different bands playing different styles of music on their roster that I am never sure exactly what type of metal music will assault me when I put a Candlelight CD in my player. This time, what we’ve got from a band called To-mera is something that is very progressive. The first track of “Transcendental” is “Traces”, and it begins with a very middle Eastern flair to it that slowly give way to a shrill, epic-sounding guitar line.

The inclusion of a synthesizer to this track give this song a very early nineties style, and it is from here that To-Mera begin their album. This track is introductory, and only weighs in at half what most of the other songs on this album last. There is no need for vocals during this track, as the band is more than able to tell a story with the interplay between the different arrangements of the instruments on this track. It is during “Blood” that To-mera’s output drastically changes. In this track, the band is much more punctual and converges to the music style of acts like Nightwish and (to a much lesser degree) Darzamat and Evanescence. The use of a piano during this track also shows that in their spare time, when they are not listening to their prog metal albums, To-Mera has quite a large stock of early nineties goth albums.

This disc is full of music, and the finished product lasts for well over fifty minutes, but one has to wonder if the band could cut out some of the repetition present in the longer tracks of “Transcendental”. This could be accomplished by cutting out one or more iterations present on each track, and making this album a much more svelte one in the forty or forty-five minute range. There ar a number of bands currently on the metal market that are doing nearly the same thing with their music, and pretty much the only thing that distinguishes an act like To-Mera from the masses of similar acts is the fact that the band can do the whole gothic approach for a minute and then immediately kick into something that is much more thrashed influenced. It is this volatile nature that makes the band interesting, and this sound should be something that is approached more in the follow-up album to “Transcendental”. Buy this if you are a fan of the genre.

Top Tracks: Dreadful Angel, Parfum

Rating: 4.9/10

[JMcQ]