Empyrean Sky resides in the barren wastelands of Chicago and exists of three guys with a common passion for metal. They started Empyrean Sky in 1997 but it wasn’t until 2000 that they released their first demo called Temptations. Several years later it’s time for their first full-length album.

The album starts with a very simple and rather standard thrash riff that kicks in the first song ‘Love Poison’. Nothing special if you’d ask me but after a minute or two this song takes a complete different turn; An acoustic guitar is added, the aggressive vocals are mixed with melodic vocals and suddenly ‘Love Poison’ has a completely different face. A nice surprise that made me very curious for the rest of the songs.

 

The next song, ‘Reality Principle’, is an instrumental song that easily could have been on an album of Dream Theater. The only problem with most instrumental songs is that I miss the vocals very much, but ‘Reality Principle’ is over before you know it. Some how Empyrean Sky make it happen to grab your attention and hold it the entire song. Even if that song lasts for more than seven and a half minute.

 

It’s also the playing time that amazes me. The average playing time of one song is almost 8 minutes but every song never gets bored. The reason behind this is probably that every song has a such different musical influences which makes them completely different from each other. For example the other instrumental song on this album ‘Pleasure Principle’ has several jazz influences. And ‘Into The Depths’ is a song that starts as a Black Metal song and halfway a violin comes in to play and changes the entire song.

 

Once I noticed Empyrean Sky exits of only three members, my admiration became even bigger. Three men that master several instruments in such a great way and even write a great album don’t come along very often. So it’s very obvious that their abilities along with the great song structure and several non metal influences didn’t only pushed this album to another limit but also to another dimension. I’m very curious how Empyrean Sky manage to pull this off onstage, but I’m even more curious about their next album. Because for myself this album is one of the surprises this year.