Dorian Opera - "No Secrets" Review

Artist/ Band: Dorian Opera
Title: No Secrets
Label: MALS
Year of Release: 2008
Offical Artist/ Band Link

The Review:

The debut from Germany's Dorian Opera, called ‘No Secrets‘, cites influences like Dream Theater, Symphony X, Yes, Rush, ELP, and Marillion. From that roster of bands, you know the band has large shoes to fill, and they great thing is they fill them surprisingly well! Even though they’re entering a genre that’s dominated by replicates of Dream Theater, sometimes cloning, the music of Dorian Opera seems to be on the outer edge of the bunch. The plus side for them are they have a vocalist that isn’t the typical prog-metal over-the-top kind and they are more classical based. This quartet consists of Oliver Weislogel (guitar), Joe Eisenburger (bass, vocals), Andrew Roussak (keyboards, backing vocals) and Harry Reischmann (drums).

You can hear from the opening instrumental "Ouverture", that you’re in for a treat especially with Roussak's synths and Weislogel's guitar interplay. They turn up the voltage on "Sacrifice", and "Tell Me Your Lies". To me this is a great way to start off a album in a take no prisoners attitude. As I mentioned before, the vocals are NOT of the Dream theater variety. Thank goodness for that!

While they do tread lightly in the Dream Theater mold, especially on “No Secrets” and “Little Lies”, it’s done more in spirit rather than note-for-note technique, at least to my ears. Other than that, the band creates some very good progressive rock mixed with progressive & neo-classical metal on their debut. The only thing I don’t like is the muddy sounding production but that is countered with the plus of great musicianship and song writing. That’s really the only downside to ‘No Secrets’. This is a very solid debut that will satisfy fans of harder-edged progressive rock and the more melodic progressive metal especially the bands mentioned above.

Reviewed by Ron Fuchs on November 19th, 2008

Tracks:

1. Ouverture

2. Sacrifice

3. Te Me Your Lies

4. Dead Or Alive

5. No Secrets

6. Little Lies

7. Fly With me

8. One Of Those Days

9. Truly Yours

10. She

Bonus track:

11. L'Estate - Presto

Reviewed Discography

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