De/Vision – Unplugged (2002)
What is the difference between this album of De/Vision and previous ones? First of all, different styles in the one album are good combined here, the melodic death metl acts as a basis, gothic metal, acts as a pleasant addition, the metal-correlated acts as the trend. In some moments we can hear orchestral arrangements, which are quite professional, for example, an introduction followed by an aggressive melodious heavy song, a rather long for the style. From time to time, the music changes to not heavy gothic metal, with female vocals by the session vocalist Sabine Weniger. The melody is not always built on riffs, but on the second guitar with meaningful solos, which is typical for melodic death metal. The female vocals will not impress you. And in the end this album is pleased to the ear, althoug it isn’t a top of the musical art, but fans of melodic death will like it. As for the lyrics, there is no sense to find direct appeals for refusal to use alcohol, drugs and animal products. All these topics are veiled by general phrases about the coming retribution, catastrophe, death. Lyrics are a bit monotonous, if you read them without music – the whole angry charge will disappear. But fortunately there is music that adds anger not only to melodies, but also to the hard heavy riffs, which makes the release pretty convincing. The music turned out to be excellent, there is a plenty of really beautiful melodies; and yet, it is a pity that beautiful female vocals is not in every song.
Acoustic performance of the synth-pop band at first seemed to me absolutely insane idea. However, practice shows that any piece of music can be arranged in any style, and performing synth-pop compositions on piano and drums – is not the most unsuccessful experiment. Of course, the well-known hits of De/Vision sound with such an accompaniment very strange, however, considerable dose of melancholy has always been present in music of this German duo, and here it is only brought to the absolute. The result is a remarkable music somewhat reminiscent of the late Anathema, very interesting, but also more boring. Obviously, the band realized it, adding to the record of their acoustic performance three previously unreleased remixes that sound more like De/Vision. I can not say that these remixes are something special, but if you are tired of acoustics, at the end of the disc I guarantee you a revival and cheerfulness. Earth.Revolt is a good album, it is worth listening to at least once.