Seven Spires – A Fortress Called Home
Release Date: 21st June 2024
Label: Frontiers Music s.r.l.
Order/Stream
Genre: Symphonic Metal
FFO: Nightwish, Avantasia, Kamelot.
Review By: Kira L. Schlechter
Let’s get this out of the way now: Boston’s Seven Spires is the best symphonic metal band out there right now. Their three previous albums made strong cases for that distinction, but their fourth, the absolutely brilliant “A Fortress Called Home,” makes it obvious.
This time around, the band is singer Adrienne Cowan, guitarist Jack Kosto, and bassist Peter de Reyna. Drummer Chris Dovas is also doing double duty with Testament.
The title track has become trademark, a scene-setting instrumental set to a sea-faring lilt and a multilayered orchestral arrangement of piano, flute, and male choir vocals. Adrienne’s voice is a siren weave and her high register is spectacular.
If we are continuing in the same theme as the previous albums, we meet our long-suffering immortal hero in “Songs Upon Wine-Stained Tongues,” which continues the lilting tempo and superfast drumming of the title track. They have a visitor to their “home atop that crumbling cliff” in the first verse, which Adrienne delivers in her blend of pained black metal shrieks and throaty death metal bellows. That visitor is sung by a male vocalist (no liner notes as to who this is, sorry), and Adrienne switches to her glorious singing voice to accompany him. Our hero, switching back to harsh vocals, is grateful for the break in their solitude – in a tragic play on words, Adrienne says, “Down the hall, up the stairs/Most nights I spiral down, down, down.” The two share talk and reminiscences, and our hero finds their visitor is a kindred spirit – her voice here is perfection, her diction precise. He tells his story, “a fatherless boy” who “sang for my fortune” – “the sea took my life/To a decadent hell in eternal night/With a demon who dealt in souls and granted dreams.” The song coalesces in a joyous blending of these two lonely souls who’ve found a bit of companionship after long solitude – the imagery is rich, the singing marvelous. Jack’s solo on the melodies of verses and chorus, as is his wont, closes this cinematic opener.
The first single, “Almosttown,” is as accessible as “Emerald Seas”’ “Succumb,” and that’s a very good thing. Its bold baroque-style musical theme is reprised between verses and is deconstructed in the later solo section. This sees our hero reflecting on their past, their insecurities, their isolation, while watching “the mad and merry crowd” frolicking below their window. They have what our hero will never have – they may be “the lost and broken,” “but they sing words I can’t bear to speak aloud,” ones of love, regret, hope, and fears. The idea of the “almosttown” is limbo, a place of neither here nor there, where our hero presides, lost in self-doubt, “in a stone gesture looming lonely in the sky” (Adrienne’s touch with wordplay just continues to impress).
The stately, gloomy tread of “Impossible Tower” continues that idea. What gives these songs such resonance and depth is Adrienne’s performance of poignant, poetic lines like “Speckled moonlight in the alcoves” and “Terrors prowl just out of sight/Through lofty arches and echoes of memories” in her black/death harsh style – the character’s agony is fully apparent. That’s achieved even more in the chorus, where the harsh and the clean intertwine, reflecting the duality of this character. This is far from whining, though; this is the depths and pits of despair that our hero has lived in for four albums now: “I’m without friend, without foe,” but knowing that they brought this on themselves, as “no one can grant forgiveness when you’re your own god.”
The band is stellar top to bottom on “Love’s Souvenir,” from its jazzy, shambling groove to Peter’s wonderful fretless bass to Jack’s tragic, weepy solo, and especially in Adrienne’s airy, ironic, world-weary singing. As the title implies, our hero once had love, but now only has its memories: as Adrienne says, in wonderful internal rhyme, “My mind is a museum of things held dear/My bones a mausoleum for my grief.” Our hero’s main flaw is laid bare here, they are “afraid to be,” they can’t “remember how to be,” to live in the moment, to not overthink. Depression lies heavy – “there is no poetry/In rotting away in bed/Rotting in my regrets.” And so does the fear of being too vulnerable – Adrienne sings, blisteringly high, our hero’s deepest feelings, a helpless plea to “define the line/Where loathing and longing lie/Where I flinch from touch/Where I crave too much.” It’s a gorgeous piece.
“Architect of Creation” might be our hero reflecting on their past, maybe how they got to this point – “First the castle perched upon the cliff above the sea/Next, repair the Great Divide.” This is an immensely dense track, a massive arrangement, orchestral lines intersecting with lightning-fast blast beats. They remember their power – “Fear me!?Love me!/Do as I say!” – and what they offered in return – they “could be their saviour – should they wish it, to be saved.” Adrienne’s effortless switching between black and death vocals in the verses, and the way she again imperceptibly layers them beneath the clean vocals in the chorus, gives such depth and texture here – her delivery of the song’s title is a crazy mix of sung/screamed/shrieked.
The driving “Portrait of Us,” with its striking main melody, may be our hero reflecting on their failed past relationship from “Emerald Seas.” “All you ever let me know,” Adrienne sings (with appropriate grit and snarl), is that love is “angry/Love is cold/Love is absent/Never told,” that it is “judgment” and “wordless.” Passing references might indicate our hero is also recalling their own parents’ mistakes – “Am I your carbon copy,” they ask, then accuse, “All that your blessing taught me/Life is to be won.” All of these disappointments have made our hero what they are: “The villain in every story.” Like “Almosttown,” this too is immediate and straightforward.
“Emerald Necklace”…wow. I don’t even care how or if it fits into the theme, and I didn’t even want to figure it out. It’s so stunning just on its own. Celtic-tinged, with whistle and light syncopation, it’s a musing on love being the only religion that matters – and it’s a tip of the hat to the band’s Boston home. The chorus is just devastating, from its soaring melody to its sentimental imagery: “But if there’s a heaven, just wait for me there/By the sea, in perpetual autumn/We’ll walk with our arms linked, and warm drinks in hand/And smile at our dreams, cause we got ‘em.” It honors the past, “the decades of I-love-yous,” and looks forward to the future, “And new decades of I-love-yous.” Jack’s aching solo before the second verse gets you right in the feels, and if you don’t get teary by the end, you’re a stronger person than I.
The trudging, gloomy “Where Sorrows Bear My Name” sees our hero back in the throes of depression and self-hatred. “Silent cells house my shame,” Adrienne roars, “There lies the truth/The villain’s reign/Where sorrows bear my name,” that is, it’s all their fault. The chorus again blends all of her vocal treatments as our hero wonders what it would be like to be different, “to be known, to be seen, to forgive?/Unbound by condition, to live without aching for home?” and “to feel safe, both in body and in mind?/Unburied by your guilt?” There’s a sense here maybe – and throughout the remaining songs – of eventual enlightenment, that maybe our hero is on the cusp of change.
“No Place For Us,” then, with its billowing, bright melody, seems to be that old past love trying to shake some sense into our hero. They speak in the verses, carefully reaching out to that love: “Take a long breath, and remember/How once we swore ‘forever’ in the night” in the first and “No more pretending/You’re safe to be with me as you are” in the second. The chorus is spectacular, the love reminding that one has to take the good with the bad, in poetry only Adrienne can write: “It has been the way of the sun/To sink and rise again/It is not to blame for the night/Nor should we discount/The beauty of stars.” The last chorus is a variation, sung by our hero (presumably, since it’s done in harsh vocals), and the juxtaposition between that and that optimistic, joyous music is superb.
“House of Lies” is a contemplation on the concept of home, perhaps the contrast between what our hero has known of home, what home is now (“a place where dreams have died/Buried beneath a house of lies”), and what we’re taught home should be, “‘Home’s where you grow/You don’t feel alone,’” a place that “doesn’t hurt.” It may be that past love who’s driving that point home, if you will, that with them, our hero was home: where “You’ve always belonged/Were loved all along … You speak and you’re heard … You get what you need/And you own your worth.” Our hero does get the last word, that relentless voice of reason and experience: “Forgive, but don’t forget all that you’ve learned.”
And at last, our hero has hit bottom and is begging for help in the deeply moving closer, “The Old Hurt of Being Left Behind.” They’re admitting their mistakes – “All the ones I left first, so I won’t feel this way … I always moved on before mourning, just to survive.” And the more they ponder them, “the more that it aches” – they realize it really does hurt (“I can’t feel the pain, but I can’t stop the tears”) and that “the absence of pain hurts more.” The title is knowing what that feels like, finally fully realizing what you’ve done to others. It’s done mostly in harsh vocals, but the chorus is faintly underlaid by singing this time, which so beautifully shows our hero’s newfound hope. The solo section features Peter’s lyrical fretless bass. And like a prayer, or a blessing, Adrienne sings the final couplet: “Somewhere, there is someone who loves you/Before and after they learn what you are.” There were tears on this one too.
Yeah, there’s a continuation of the story of the past three albums on “A Fortress Called Home” for sure, and there’s probably a ton more interpretations of the action than what have been put forth here. But even more than that, this is a profoundly, painfully personal exercise whose emotion is visceral and real. You can’t fake the depths of self-examination plumbed here – you have to go there yourself. Indeed, Adrienne hinted at “visiting the void twice” while writing the album. It will send listeners on that very same journey.
(5 / 5)
