THERION – Sirius B/Lemuria

Oh yeah, the beast is back! Not literally – it’s neither my ex-girlfriend nor my work colleague with the wide mouth that you might think I’m talking about (luckily, they’re far away) – what I’m talking about is the Swedish Death/Doom/Heavy/(Whatever) act that calls themselves Therion, and in particular, their new release(s!). Yep, they’re in for a double album this time, and it’s not at all a bad one.

There’s a lot of music to dig into here, and most of it is pretty good, but some parts do indeed suck. The clean male vocals, for example, sound like a drunk Viking 1200 years past his peak, and come close to ruining quite a few songs here. The title track, ”Lemuria,” for example, would have been great with better vocals, while ”The Dream of Swedenborg,” further exacerbates its boredom with no help from the vocal efforts.

The female vocals are beautiful, though, and add great spice to this dish. Tracks like ”An Arrow From the Sun,” for example, are excellent collages of extravagant melodies (main man and lead guitarist Christofer Johnsson has come up with some great themes this time), female soprano vocals, and choirs utilization.

The more aggressive stuff on the album also works very well. ”Typhon” is a great opener with its powerful guitars and nice arrangements, and ”Feuer Overture/Prometheus Entlesselt” (you know, what ever happened to song titles like ”Fire,” ”War,” and the like???) combines dark, German (ach ja bitte!) vocals, nice synths, and great guitar lines (but here are those horrendous vocals again … don’t these guys have a producer??? Or at least EARS??).

”Blood of Kings,” my favorite to qualify as the ”Original Song Title Of The Year,” is pure Nightwish meets Bal Sagoth (Tarja and Byron could be a nice pairing…), while ”The Khlysti Evangelist” and ”Kali Yuga (Part 1)” bears resemblance to both Symphony X and Iron Maiden, being among the most straightforward Metal songs on the album. The male vocals also sounds decent here. ”Kali… (Part 2),” and the second title track ”Sirius B,” are back in sympho-territory again, rounding off an album which has many good moments, but some unfortunately boring moments too. The guitar work is tremendous – I hear both Yngwie, Criss Oliva, and Eric Johnson in here – and the arrangements and sound production works very well. It’s no Theli, which I hold as Therion’s best, but worth buying if you’re in a more fluffy and symphonic mood.

P.S. Please note that I have not heard these entire albums. My promotional copies only have a select number of songs from each album. They’re probably the best ones, though, so keep that in mind …