Amaze Knight takes me as a band that still hasn’t found their style yet. "The Key" is made up of five tracks all between eight and eleven minutes. With the exception of the third track "Heartless" the rest of the songs sound like they have too many ideas hodgepodge together and lack enough focus to make them feel unified.
The band has more of a rock sound with bits of metal and electronic thrown in different places. At times there are segments of music that remind me of Symphony X which I found enjoyable, but unfortunately these moments get lost within the overall song structure. The music just travels all over the place and makes it difficult to get into. Like in the opening track "Imprisoned (shadows past)", it starts with a heavy atmospheric almost doom metal sound. Then at thirty-three seconds into the song it’s broken by weird goofy video game-esque keyboard sounds that transition the song into a heavy progressive metal state (this is the part that reminds me of Symphony X). Then at the two minute mark it gets progressively softer into more of a smooth rock song, which is then broken at three minutes, thirteen seconds by a really wonky keyboard solo, only to go back to a more progressive rock sound. The song continues that way with choppy transitions from soft to heavy throughout the rest of the song. The song is very disjointed, it’s like listening to a person who tries to tell a story but they keep forgetting important details and skipping around.
Apart from the music I also have an issue with the vocalist Fabrizio Aseglio, he has a good voice but a lot of the time he doesn’t really feel like he is into the music. Most of the time the make or break factor in a band is the vocalist and most of the tracks Aseglio just doesn’t do the trick. However the one song where he really shines on is "Restless Soul" this shows me that he has potential to be a great singer, he just needs more work.
The one place the whole band really comes together is on the baled "Hartless". There is nothing particularly outstanding about it, but it doesn’t suffer from the choppy transitions that the rest of the tracks have. If the future it would be ideal if they composed more songs that have a clear direction like this one. Overall "The Key" is not a band album it’s just not as developed as it could be. Given that this is their first release they probably have a lot more room to grow as musician and I would expect to see improvement as they become more experienced.
(I give "The Key" a 6 out of 10)
