After Forever

This afternoon, while doing various sorts of work, I listened to the first three albums by the Dutch symphonic metal band After Forever. One of the founding members of this band was Mark Jansen, who would later found Epica, and the vocalist was Floor Jansen (no relation), who is now the vocalist for Nightwish. Mark Jansen left after the second album; there were three more after that.

The first two albums are Prison of Desire and Decipher. I don't think these are quite up to what Mark Jansen would shortly do with Epica, but you can see the seeds of that music here. They do a great job integrating the orchestral elements with the rock elements, and Floor is, as always, just brilliant on vocals. (There are also growled, metal-style vocals, which Mark Jansen would continue with Epica. The contrast between these is sometimes called 'beauty and the beast', a term that seems to have originated with the Finnish band Battle Beast.)

The third album, Invisible Circle, is a really ambitious concept album, telling the story of an extremely dysfunctional family and how the cycle of abuse perpetuates itself. It's depressing and sad, as you'd expect, but insightful and powerful. It's not uniformly successful, but there is some pretty good stuff here. It's a bit more on the progressive metal end, with some obvious elements of bands like Yes and ELP. 

Indeed, it sometimes feels to me like Yes is a major influence (perhaps at a remove) on this stuff. A lot of the 'clean' female vocals remind me of Jon Anderson's vocal style. (Yeah, I'm very into Yes.)