ELYSION: Bring Out Your Dead

ELYSION
Bring Out Your Dead

MASSACRE

8/10

OPERATIC POP METAL: It sure as hell doesn’t sound like it, but Bring Out Your Dead is Elysion’s first album in nearly a decade (since 2014’s Someplace Better), a not so conceptual concept album centered around the theme of “extreme times require extreme measures to get rid of everything rotten inside us and let the healing begin.” The band’s third full-length is a powerhouse display of modern metal that’s more Evanescence and Lacuna Coil than it is Epica and Leaves’ Eyes.

Led by dynamo frontwoman Christianna Hatzimihali, Bring Out Your Dead opens with a strong shot across the bow in perhaps the album’s heaviest track, “Blink of an Eye,” which pairs thick, chugging riffs with soaring hooks, all awash in Hatzimihali’s opulent vocal dynamic, with some symphonic elements, harmonies, and melodic atmospherics tossed in here and there—a successful blueprint Elysion employs throughout Bring Out Your Dead (“As the Flower Withers,” “This Time”). 

The band balances the record with the expected balladry (“Far Away,” “Buried Alive”), vulnerable entries that allow Hatzimihali to truly shine, bar after memorable bar. “Don’t give me no reason to run from this prison / I would rather stay instead / There’s nothing to save, I’m safe in this grave / There’s no pain when you are dead,” she sings on the latter. The album’s first single, “Crossing Over,” is a powerful highlight, though it’s far from the only one to be found up and down the track listing of Bring Out Your Dead. “Brand New Me” is a single in the making, one sure to make live crowds swoon, “Blue Seasons” is a beautiful slab of Lacuna Coil worship, and closer “Eternity” is a mid-tempo gem that encapsulates the sonic element of Bring Out Your Dead on the whole. 

Bring Out Your Dead is Elysion’s strongest album to date, one that should help usher in a wonderful new era for the Greek metallers. ~ Brian Campbell