Chaos Magic - Chaos Magic

Published July 02 2015

*=Staff's pick	I'm Alive Dangerous Game One Drop Of Blood Seraphim From The Stars* A Little Too Late* Passionflow Dead Memories Please Don't Tell Me Right Now The Point Of No Return

Genre	Symphonic Rock	Caterina Nix	Vocals
Tracks	11	Timo Tolkki	Guitar
Running time	53 Min.	-	Guitar
Label	Frontiers Music	Timo Tolkki	Bass
Release	July 03, 2015	Jami Huovinen	Drums
Country	Finland/Chile	Timo Tolkki	Keyboard
Producer	Timo Tolkki
Similar artists	---

Chaos Magic is yet another release, in the plethora of projects, that finds its way out to the world via the Italian label Frontiers Music. This time, once again, involving producer, guitarist, songwriter and former Stratovarius main man Timo Tolkki. On this presumably short-lived project, the outspoken and open-hearted Finn has teamed up with Chilean female vocalist Caterina Nix and also with drummer Jami Huovinen.

I am the first one to understand that Mr. Tolkki tries to come out with something that separates him a bit from his past work, but this effort is regrettably just plain boring, no matter how many times I listen to it. It includes unemotional, contrived and plastic symphonic rock songs with too standardized arrangements and it seems like it almost follows a constrained manual, without the possibility of coming out colorful, on right about everything else in a musical aspect.

The vocals are set too high in the mixing and when I turn up the volume loud, the vocals come out really sharp and my eardrums are kind of automatically trying to keep out the painful noise by twisting themselves. Caterina Nix basically has a beautiful voice, but she can't execute, because the melodies backing her up are just simply too insufficient for her to lay down great vocal lines to.

I really can't find anything on this record the least appealing. Most of its contents are as a matter of fact incredibly lame. Believe me when I say that it's not great fun to write these unflattering words about something that someone has spend a great amount of time and effort on, but it's nevertheless kind of my role in all this. Please, Timo, for the love of metal, if there's ever an opening, do us all a favor and go fucking reunite with the Stratovarius boys and come out valid once more. Never again will I listen to this record.

Performance	Originality	Production	Vocals	Songwriting
6	3	5	6	2

Summary
2 chalices of 10 - Tobbe