Beautiful mystical intro “The Warning” opens this highly acclaimed album of Swedish progressive rock-metal band Condition Red. The album named simply “II”, so you can guess that it’s the second effort of the band. Such simple name blend in with the music perfectly. It would be really difficult and maybe almost impossible to name this many-sided album, which combines progressive rock, power metal and different sounds which could be used in mane other music styles. It could be surprise that just the second album is so good, but musicians also play in other bands and obviously they have wide experience.
This music is like a river, it smoothly changes, flows from one instrumental song to another with soft, clean, delicate female vocal of beautiful Ella Grussner, and then music turns to fast, rhythmical power metal with sharp guitar riffs… Like good artist can draw music, these Sweds can play pictures and images. They have so many colours, and they use them a lot – all the music colours like tempo, rhythm, different instruments…. You can find on “II” complicated instrumental songs (f.i. “Cycles”), fast and more straight power-metal-oriented songs (like “Eye of a Storm” and instrumental “The Eagle’s Return” with great keyboard work), silky slow songs, epic mid-tempo compositions full of backing vocals and much more… And still every composition looks just like part of entire one-piece creation, the whole album sounds as one whole effort.
Condition Red are masters of sounds. Every song is filled with variation of sounds: it can be amazing guitar solo, it can be perfect various drumming, and it can be plenty of different keyboards’ sounds, violin, acoustic guitar... Every single song here is a large and vast world of sound and rhythm. And the whole album is full of wonderful dynamic, energy, melody and drive.
But of course it’s not enough to add couple of tens of different instruments to the music and get a perfect result. So I can state that Condition Red are fairly good arrangers and composers: their music river naturally flows from one song to another and when this melodious album ends with liquid outro “Out Of the Red” in pastel shades, you wake up in wonder if it’s the end of disc, and you look the white and red booklet to make sure that it’s really so…
This album of that kind you can listen to again and again and again and never be bored of. The only small lack is not enough perfect production for such amazing music.

Написал - Onni