review: Astralium

Astralium

Land of Eternal Dreams

Rockshots Records (EU), Spiritual Beast (JP)

23 August 2019

Throw away your happy pills, friend. You won’t need them anymore. The Italians are coming! The Italians are coming to bring joy to the peoples of this world and the next one. Just look to your imagination to find the meaning of the album artwork and title. Astralium was formed with the purpose of making joy, cheer and happiness into songs. Astralium unfolds in soprano/high melodic singing and some contrasting vocals of the male voice sailing on the angelic glory of sugar, spice and everything nice of symphonic power metal filled to the brim with outrageously naughty and shameless ear-friendly songs to tantalize the vulnerable souls with the irritatingly irresistible heavenly pop metal. Astralium—with the confidence of Babe Ruth calling the shot pointing to the centerfield bleachers—wants desperately to tear down the walls of any listener near this music, and the band is so confident that they will need exactly one listen to convince.

The death.

The angels.

The heavens.

Ways of infinity.

The fate of the soul.

The meaning of dreams.

The purpose of life on Earth.

Questions of immortality.

Searching harmony.

Manifest doubt.

Desperation.

Find hope.

Eternal.

That’s the subject matter of the album. Their minds are set on another world, and they seek the sensation of grandiosity in elegant and luxurious songs. This debut album has been years in the making and it shows a huge effort to impress fans of genre. The sound is very polished and the band seeks the lush and fancy production that sounds like a metal band backed up by a symphony. It’s that type of contemporary production for fans that enjoy the super sweet keyboard-laden, pop-oriented heavy rock.

Here in the United States this style seems to have less success than in Europe. American reviewers often mention this type of music with sarcasm or irony or some pejorative attitude. However, it looks like Nightwish and other bands like that do tour the U.S. and seem to come back for more touring. Of course, this album involves a lot of studio magic and they probably don’t have the money (yet?!) to pay philharmonic orchestras. However, for fans of big symphonic power metal with soprano singing, songs with the big bounce of the super symphonic poppy sound, this album might go down a storm. The fans will be doing air keyboards and conducting imaginary orchestras.

facebook.com/astraliumband