Angra are a cool little band. I preferred Andre as vocalist but Edu was good and it goes without saying Fabio Lione is a top quality vocalist.
Nice album, includes Edu Falaschi (ex-Angra) on vocals, Emppu Vuorinen (Nightwish) on guitars, Lauri Porra (Stratovarius) on bass and Casey Grillo (Kamelot) on drums - so a bit of a power metal supergroup. Other than Edu the lineup was totally different for their next album though.
Thanks, never heard of this guy. I guess he was just in the right place at the right time? Recording at the studio with a different band?
Jake E on Timo Tolkki's Avalon album The Enigma Birth: Way better than Cyhra II. If there is a Cyhra III released they need to compose the music much, much better. Jake isn't a bad singer at all, but Cyhra II made him seem pretty boring and one dimensional.
Jake is a great singer but his latest compositions were boring. The difference with this is that TT is power metal while Cyhra is modern metal, which usually means pop with guitars and vocals oriented music.
What I've always found strange about Cyhra is that they do incorporate elements of Power Metal into their music, even on the first album. "Here To Save You" is basically a PM track, "Forever" as well. If you only had the tracklist for No Halos From Hell and hadn't heard the music you'd assume it was a PM album with titles like "Battle From Within", "I Am The One", "Lost In Time", "Kings Tonight", "Blood Brothers" and "Kings and Queens". But they are trying to blend this PM stuff with modern metal and all it does is dilute both elements. If you're going to do PM then you need to adhere to certain rules and conventions. If you only go in half way it won't sound good. It feels like Cyhra still don't have an identity to structure their music around.
It feels... Complicated. I don't think that they have a clear direction. There are a lot of different elements joined together that don't really bring a good coherent result. There's power metal, there's modern metal, there's some In Flames and some Amaranthe. Like they're trying to create something new from the ashes of their old selves and that is not working. They stated that they want to become the new Iron Maiden but that doesn't work. They don't understand Iron Maiden's formula. They pretend to be out of the mainstream to create their own mainstream brand, while Cyhra tried, without even trying to hide it, to win fans among the mainstream listeners. Catchy songs without pretensions and without an aggression that could stop a wider audience from following them. But they have not created anything special or different enough to attract people. And that's the thing about modern metal. They don't need to be metal to make music like that and their main (goal) audience aren't metalheads. Metalheads are more demanding but also more loyal. I'm not sure if I'm making sense.
I get what you're saying - as you say, it's complicated. Cyhra don't have a clear vision of what they want to be, which makes their music a strange smorgasbord of ideas which don't tend to blend together very well. Although I still think the first album had a lot of promise and plenty of songs on there I appreciate for their unusual structure. Second album is just boring. Strip away the interesting parts of Letters To Myself and No Halos from Hell is the result. Still a mixture of stuff, but all bland ingredients.
I hope that the put a bigger effort or their next album. They need to sit down, think what they want to be and how they want to be and then come with a plan other than do 3 minutes long catchy songs. Though I doubt that because NHFH was mostly acclaimed by the critic.
I disagree. They need to sit down and listen to US give them a lecture on how to sound good. Obviously they don’t know anything about their sound and if they sit down and think they will get confused. We need to be Cyhra’s Fredrick Nordstrom and whip their asses to make good music. If we let them do it again it will be 15 seconds of cool riff, boring bullshit for 2 minutes, 50% chance of a cool solo, then more boring stuff. If we were in charge we could make them produce 3-4 minutes of AWESOME on every song. It starts with us staging an intervention with them.
I’m actually totally serious. I really don’t think Cyhra 3 will be any better, I’ve given up on these guys.
Pretty sure there’s 5 minutes of good stuff on Cyhra 2. Unless they change singers nothing’s going to change.
Dreams Gone Wrong and Man of Eternal Rain are decent, similar standard to the first album. Lost in Time actually isn't bad as a ballad, having listened to it more. The rest... just not fleshed out enough. Some good ideas, riffs and solos scattered across the album but outside of the three I mentioned above none of it is ever brought together coherently for an entire song. I Am The One, Bye Bye Forever and Hit Me are basically the same song with different lyrics (seriously, even down to the run times - 3:50, 3:50, 3:47). Combine the best elements of all of them into one song and maybe you get something that's OK, but separated they aren't very strong. Jake wrote most of the music this time around and it seems like he still has a lot to learn about songwriting. If Jesper is involved more for their third album then we might get something interesting again, but that's a big, big if at this juncture. My concern is that Jake will look at the paid-for, pandering reviews and think what he did last time was great, even though it really wasn't.
My favourite songs from the first album are 'Heartrage' and 'Forever' but overall it's not a bad first album and there are good songs. The second one got me a bit confused because most of the songs sounded the same and I think there were way too many songs for the inspiration they had. And I am not sure if Jesper was very involved in the album but it was a disappointing second effort in my opinion. I'll give it another listen to see if my opinion about the album is still the same.
From memory Jake wrote the majority of the second album. You can hear a couple of contributions from Jesper here or there, and I think the solos and certain melodic sections are Euge, but Jake was the primary creative force for NHIH. Upon first listen I found the album boring and derivitive, save for a couple of decent tracks that sounded like they were recorded for Letters to Myself. It's still not an album I'd choose to listen to at any point, but there are some songs that I'll keep on if they come on shuffle. I Am The One, Bye Bye Forever, Dreams Gone Wrong, Lost in Time, Hit Me and Man of Eternal Rain are all OK in isolation. Problem is when you put them together as part of an album they just aren't that interesting. Dreams Gone Wrong and Man of Eternal Rain are (imo) by far the strongest songs on the record, whilst everything else is average at best. Nothing offensive to me, but nothing creative, interesting or new either.
