Genre: Melodic Death Metal
This album is one of my favorites. It keeps throwing curveball after curveball at you starting with the first actual song. You're Seriously, buy this now. I could just leave the review at that. It's that good. It combines amazing melodies with the raw power of death metal, but a lot of its songs are very accessible. You'll enjoy something on here...even if its Times Without Changes
Got it yet? Great! Now toss it into your CD player and play it. I'll give you a guided tour through the awesomeness of 11 Dreams. Or a review, if you wish.
We start with the keyboard intro Into the Sea of Dark Desire, whose title will show up in a later song. You're half expecting some sort of Bach fugue to pop out, and then the drums and bass will promptly kick your ass.
We have moved to World Hate Center, which makes a brash first impression. More intense than some non-melodic death metal I've heard, the song--and band--derives its power from the vocals. You have Mikkel Sandager doing lead vocals and rasps, but the growls come from the bassist, "Kral" (who is infinitely superior to many other metal bassists by actually being audible). World Hate Center has an absolutely violent verse in vocal delivery and an acceptable chorus to boot. Then the guitar solo rears its head near the end of the song when you least expect it.
Once World Hate Center is done with its curb stomping, the album heads for its title track, 11 Dreams. This may be the highlight of the album. It's a sort of quasi-ballad where the guitars are still in full force during the verses, but the vocals have toned down to excellent singing. The keyboard more or less steals the show here, with piano and synth-pad timbres creating a beautiful soundscape. 11 Dreams is actually quite emotional and makes a stunning contrast with World Hate Center. The first time I heard this song, I was on a nighttime trip to Florida, and the combination of this song and the highway lights left me without words.
And here we have the strangely capitalized reDestructDead. Musically, it sits between World Hate Center and 11 Dreams, so it's neither here nor there. As such, it doesn't have that much of a purpose and is almost filler. It does have one saving grace; up to now, the lyrics haven't been mentioned since they're nearly superfluous, but now they have room to work their magic. reDestructDead seems to tell the tale of some sort of war machine that has developed a will of its own. Its instinctive rage contradicts everything else that it wants; it is condemned to hate forever. That's what I think, at least; the fun is in interpreting them yourself and connecting them to the music. At any rate, this is the weakest song, though being the worst song on this album is like being the dumbest person in MENSA. Oh, and the solo is the best one yet.
The next track comes. "Come closer...I dare you to fall asleep," Kral chants. This is Firesoul, a song where the lyrics tell a strange and unclear tale of desire and fear. The music, however, is straightforwardly spectacular; the riffs are spectacular, the drums make spectacular fills (that, my friends, is how you use double bass pedals), and the vocals are spectacular enough to make me jealous. Mikkel shows off his falsetto here, too. As if that weren't enough, the music sort of pauses for a bit, proceeds at a slightly slower tempo while Mikkel chants out a bridge, throws out a solo (which is, of course, spectacular), and then fades to spectacular piano with a spectacular female vocalist singing the spectacular bridge you heard earlier. Spectacular.
After Firesoul, any further attempts at being spectacular would fail in comparison, so Mercenary tried a different tack. Sharpen the Edges is the simplest thing that could have possibly worked. There's only a handful of different elements in this song, and the lyrics actually make objective sense for once; "If I can't have you, then no one will." In spite of this, the chorus is chilling. This song is essentially padding: there had to be something less epic between Firesoul and the next track, hence this song. I rarely listen to it on its own, but I never skip it when running through the album.
Supremacy v2.0, another strange title, is the longest song on the album. It starts out with a solo which shows the general attitude of the song: defeated yet still hopeful. Kral delivers the introductory growling, then Mikkel takes over and is awesome all over the song, as are the riffs. It's basically an upgrade of reDestructDead. It builds up to cries of "Supremacy! (Supremacy!) Forever supreme to me!" and then...stops dead. :(
It seems that Mercenary thought there was too much intensity in this album so far, so they covered a pop song to fix it. Namely, Music Non Stop as originally performed by Kent, some Swedish pop band that produced two albums in English then stuck to Swedish. This is one of their English songs. There's not much to say about this. It's straightforward pop with a catchy chorus. The thing about it is that the album production gives it some sense of intensity. Other than that, this is just a simple interlude, much like Sharpen the Edges.
Having covered a pop song of all things, Mercenary has committed a grave blasphemy to the gods of metal. (No, I'm not serious. Just play along.) As penance, they must reference Megadeth in the next track. So they do. Falling starts off with a riff that sounds much like the one from Megadeth's Take No Prisoners, and the lyrics even resemble the first part of that song: "Infiltrate them! Disintegrate them!" Further, the lyrics may be written from the POV of Lucifer: "I am the fallen angel/The only one am I". Yet, in an ironic twist, the song also includes a singalong chorus. They aren't kvlt, but they're still awesome anyway. Kral gets to chant, then there's a sweet riff, then the best solo on the album unrolls. (This song has a lot of bests.) As Mikkel repeats "Falling down/I'm crawling down" after the last chorus, the song fades to piano.
You may be expecting a quasi-interlude to show up now, given the pattern that's been followed since reDestructDead. Well, you're wrong. You get a full blown interlude instead. Well, Times Without Changes is short enough to be an interlude, yet it still has some sense of musical progression and stands alone reasonably well (cf. Wait for Sleep by Dream Theater). It's based on piano. and it shows us just how great of a singer Mikkel is, in case we didn't know.
And now for the closer. Loneliness is tied with 11 Dreams for the highly contested #1 spot. The two songs are quite similar. Really, it depends on whether you're more sorry for the world or yourself. 11 Dreams is more keyboard-based, while the best part of Loneliness is the final chorus.
"Never make mistakes
In life we dedicate
Our souls to someone else
Left dangling by ourselves
Only...
Lonely..."
Those last two lines repeat for about a minute as the album fades out.
And now 11 Dreams is over. Well, there's two bonus tracks containing a "3-D mix" of 11 Dreams (which is interesting but not worth listening to) and a radio edit (cramming a 7 minute song into 3 and a half minutes doesn't work at all). But the actual masterpiece is over. If you like metal, get this NOW. If you don't, get it NOW anyway. This album is 10/10. Or 5/5. Or 1/1. I don't care. I love this album.