Album Review/ Classical : Chameleon Music’s ‘The Bell Tower and The Cross’
Chameleon Music in a project that blends classical arrangements with chorals, electronica, and a cinematic ethos. The result is an immersive, affecting, and impactful listening experience. It’s as if the music comes to life, with such a vivid sensibility, and it plays out in front of you. There’s grandeur but there’s also a very real exploration of cinematic scenery and music.
Their latest release is ‘The Bell Tower and The Cross’, an album that lays out such a fascinating and fantastical flow. It’s lush with visual moments. It feels as though they’re all swirling around you, moments of mystery, adventure, and a mystical suspense. The album begins with ‘Last Adventure for a Pirate King?’ a track that is very expressive, but it has a veil that conceals and calls to the listener. As you go deeper and explore, you get a taste of the composition. Its richness, its secrets and its capacity for depth.
Listening to the album, you feel transported to a classical era of kingdoms and towns and fairylands. The instrumentals take you to vivid spaces, to scenery that you probably saw in period dramas. The drama of the breakout track is carried throughout the album with different energy and vibes. In the title track, we see a solemn flow. In ‘Each Face Retains the Mask it Wore’ we see a mellow and playful composition with melodies that chat you up. We see a new age electronica seep in as well, carving a depth and laying out angled grooves that transforms the mood of the composition.
‘Whispers Across Wasteland’ is an ethereal sphere. The instrumentals carry across a vast space. There are mysteries and secrets dispersed, but more than anything else there is a silence, a loud silence that says it all. It is hypnotising and so enthralling. While ‘Exiles Return’ is a light and airy flow, ‘Dante : The Lost Poet’ is detailed with incredible tragedy and deep melancholy. The ability of the artist to transfer intense and deep emotional experiences into music is incredible. Especially in the way it wordlessly conveys the experience. It is elegant, intense and expressive. Like a rich painting.
The penultimate track ‘Flash of the Blade’ is dramatic and so incredibly dynamic! With such bold instrumental strokes and thriving layers, the artist really sets a climactic peak. For the epilogue, we have ‘Dust of Dreams’, a track that is mellow and levelled before it picks up an electronic pulse with an urgency. There is a tension, a score that builds up the scene, celebrates the transition. Leading into a dark cave of hypnotic wonders and a nebulous conclusion that is up to the listener to interpret. Listen Now!
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The album is available for streaming on Soundcloud!
You can listen to ‘The Bell Tower and The Cross’ by Chameleon Music here -
