Here's my problem with 6 Days to Nowhere...
The lyrics and song titles used to be majestic, romantic and fit the mood of the songs perfectly. These days, their lyrics are horrible. "Wolves N' Lambs", "Mother Earth", "Rusty Nail" are all prime examples.
The choruses and vocal melodies are hit or miss. They can come up with some truly powerful melodies, don't get me wrong. The problem is, I can really only name 3-4 good songs from the 14 on 6 Days... the rest are samey and forgettable.
Another problem is their lack of imagination with keyboards (the band used to have powerful sweeping symphonic sections and great keyboard melodies all over the place). 6 Days has a lot of midtempo power chord progressions with the keys used as an afterthought. In most cases, if you dumped the keyboards, you probably wouldn't notice. To me, this is a formula for boredom.
My biggest issue, however, is in the guitars. On only one song, "Mother Earth" (which has terrible lyrics by the way), do the majestic guitar harmonies and passionate solos return. If you listen to Return to Heaven Denied and close your eyes, you can feel the power and majesty in every note of those solos.
You won't hear songs like "Lady Lost in Time", "Out of Memory", "New Horizons", or "Night of Dreams" anymore. The self titled album in '03 was fairly decent... Freeman slightly less so but still enjoyable. And finally on 6 Days to Nowhere... as much as I tried to like it, I found it lacking many of the ingredients I loved about Labyrinth to begin with *mentioned above*.
Oh well, at least Vision Divine is still puting out truly fantastic progressive power metal. Please don't take this as me ragging on Labyrinth, as they are one of my favorite bands. I'm just pointing out a decline in quality over the years, directly related to the points I mentioned above.
The Michael
