To be honest: We West Germans can count ourselves lucky that in 1990 we were brought together with a country that had an incredibly high artistic potential and that enriched our cultural life with bands like "Die Apokalyptischen Reiter", "Knorkator", "Deserted Fear", "Manos" or "Disillusion", all of whom are far more creative, groundbreaking and artistic with their music than traditional West German bands such as Accept, Kreator, Destruction or Scorpions.
After we saw Disillusion at the "Death and Doom" festival in Lisbon in 2019 and got to know each other, I started to look into the releases of this band. My first reviews were then in January 2020 about the concert in Lisbon and "The Liberation". As in a classic novel, the eleven-minute opener "Am Abgrund" presents all the elements, storylines and feelings that will follow in the following work. The art in this piece consists in combining the artistic and musical liberties with the love addressed in the text into a homogeneous and contradictory whole.
I actually write track-to-track reviews, which is not possible in view of the songs and song structures that flow harmoniously into one another. This disc is designed more as a soundtrack or a diary than as a "pure" record. Andy Schmitt's voice creates the movie- and life-feeling; spoken, growls, sung, breathed, roared, all his voice´s facets are represented in each and every song. This harmonizes with the incredible guitar work, their different tones and the mood and ambiance inherent in all tracks. In order to get all the musical directions into a rhythmic order, you also need the drummer who find the balance between to play along in a song or find something to contribute to the song.
The strength of this album undoubtedly lies in uniting and reflecting all everyday contradictions in music and the accompanying lyrics. This review is the latest review and it is interesting to see the focus put on this record by my predecessors. Depending on the individual mood, new pieces of the mosaic that were previously undiscovered are revealed in the songs. Just as roman concrete heals and compacts itself, this album gains more and more feelings and surprises with a temporal and emotional distance. For me a sign of good art, which, despite the possibility of duplication, is constantly gaining in aura.
This album will still sound new and fresh in ten to twenty years and will reflect the listener's feelings.
A fantastic record that takes time and occasion to appreciate all of its intricacies, inconsistencies and vision.
Beside Elder's "Innate Passage" the prog rock record of 2022.