Amaran

Pristine In Bondage (Listenable)
by Martin Popoff

On album two, Amaran do a bunch of things adequately, but few of them with truly memorable result. What you get is a combination of pounding, proggish but pedestrian power metal, fronted by a mid-operatic female vocalist, landed somewhere between the Goth metal world, old Gathering, low Nightwish, and Lullacry. Besides the glut-filling songs, the most annoying thing about the record is the trebly, screechy, almost distorted, plainly just-too-damn-bright recording. Nice idea: Power that verges on thrash with calm female vocals, but none of the parts excel to any sort of manic extent, resulting in a lack of urgency to care about the whole. I’m surprised really, cos the parts and the whole felt fresher on A World Betrayed, the band’s debut. Might be two things: a) a passage of time (two years) that has added dozens of power metal albums to the fray, many at the hard end like this, and b) a subconscious nagging feeling that the band has turned in the same record again.
(www.listenable.net)