Saturnian ‘Dimensions’ Album Review

Beginning at the beginning, like any story told, is a flamboyant instrumental track layered with choir singing that leads your mind through an symphonic star wars, towards the second track where this album by Saturnian truly begins, ‘Into Etheria’. This then explodes into powerful blast beats accompanied with the majestic voice of Wilson who resembles the sound of Shagrath of Dimmu Borgir.
Uprising in 2010, this five piece band have done a superb job of their debut album, ‘Dimensions’ released on Indie Recordings. With the album being produced by the legendary Russ Russell (Napalm Death, Dimmu Borgir, Evile), it is hard to think why it wouldn’t be a top-notch album.

By the third track things have calmed down a bit and Lydia’s angelic soprano voice layered on top of the frying vocals adds a melancholy beauty to the song with soaring melodies, twisting back and forth from clean to black vocals. The track then turns to a direction that sounds so epic, it upset me to find it to be the end. This track could have easily been a lengthy narrative that could have done so much more to explore these last two beautiful minuets.

The album is very dynamic and the songs range in subject from dreams and astral projection, fourth dimensional theory, interstitial time, and hallucination. Half way through the album we come to ‘Shadow of Prophecy’ where we start to hear the clean vocals of Wilson mixed with Gregorian chant all layered in with razor sharp riffs by Myk and Martin finishing up with a fantastic guitar solo.
The sixth track starts off with a progressive rock twist and then mixes into the usual symphonic and soprano sound of the rest of the album accompanied with Sam’s fantastic drumming. Almost like Opeth, Shining and Cradle Of Filth rolled into a two-minuet introduction for the song ‘Dimentions’ from which the album is named. The majority of track seven is well executed but I don’t feel this is the strongest song on the album. A quarter of the way, and two thirds through I could have sworn I heard the beginning of ‘A Grand Declaration Of War’ by Mayhem which unfortunately were the best parts from this track. The song fades away instead of finishing triumphantly but it does quietly lead it’s way to a powerful start to ‘Origins of the Future’, which in my opinion has victory over the previous track. This one oscillates marvelously within its musical sphere and the combination of chords and vocals crashing upon each other create a truly emotive sound.

‘The Immaculate Deception’ marks a great point within the album and then leads to the last track in this theatrical journey, named ‘Wreathed In Flame’ which used the keyboard sounds of a Sitar alongside the classic piano.
Some areas in songs didn’t flow as well between each other but over all I would say this was a good album and enjoyable to explore. It is nice to hear the different influences which make up this extreme symphonic metal band, however in some cases the influences heard are a little too clear and there are moments within this material where I couldn’t help but think areas could have been looked over before release.
Delivered in a grand and dramatic style, this is a supernal journey that would enchant many symphonic metal fans so go give it a listen.

6/10

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