Like with quite some bands by now, I came across French outfit Crysalid mostly by coincidence on MySpace. Apparently having no record deal and therefore no distribution in Denmark, I turned to the band to get a copy of their first full length album “Come Closer” for a review. The numbers on their MySpace page sounded promising: A clear progressive style with influence from among others Dream Theater (which modern prog metal band isn’t these days?), but also with a harder edge to separate them from some of the lot of other prog metal bands inspired by DT.

Labelling music isn’t always easy, but with these guys I came to think of earlier Dream Theater and Queensrÿche (middle period, “Empire”-stuff), but also melodic power metal – a good mix between powerful riffs, melody and a lot of progressive elements – not that it’s a rip off of any of those.

The vocals are neither like James LaBrie or Geoff Tate, but more “traditional” power metal-vocals with a bit more edge than those, and it’s quite liberating to hear a bit more aggressive vocals on progressive stuff. The singer (Matthias Nussbaumer) has a slight accent to the French tone, but not to an extent where it gets “disturbing”, like it can get with some bands from the French area.

The rest of the musicians count Maxime Maulet (guitars and voice effects), Ilario Cavaliere (keyboards), Guillaume Giazzi (bass) and Sebastian Perrad (drums). Finding more about the band proved to be quite a problem for me, as the only documentation and reviews I could find was in French (and I don’t speak French at all), and I must admit that I know very little about the music scene in France, but apparently they one way or another have connection to more well known French bands (like J.C.Jess and Mörglbl), so they don’t “come out of nothing”.

The sound of the recording (done in the Savern Studio) is good; typical prog like: very clear and defined on all instruments.

To me the cover is a bit off, compared to the music: a landscape in very neutral colours, with a mountain shaped like a head turned ninety degrees and mirrored – not exactly the selling point or eye catcher for the shop, whether physical or on the internet. From my point of view it’s a nice picture, and to an extent a good idea, just not for an album cover. Too bad it’s not more “catchy” and depicting for the music.

Another slight problem could be the length of the album, a little less than 40 minutes playing time…when the last song ends, it’s like: “What, is that it?”, but on the other hand you could count that as a quality mark for this album: The time passes quickly in good company, and the final words should then be: “More like this, please.”