Concerto Moon - Rain Forest

Year of Release: 2000
Label: Limb Music Products
Catalog Number: LMP 0004-017 CD
Format: CD
Total Time: 75:15:00

This Japanese band has slowly started to grow a name outside their own country with the Internet being an important contributor as well as their signing to one of the biggest European labels in LMP. After three full albums, a couple of EPs and a live disc, this band finally struck it rich with their deal outside of Japan that will see the re-release of three of their earlier albums with new artwork and bonustracks. Rain Forest comes along with three bonustracks!

The band play melodic heavy metal with huge neo-classical influences and a slight progressive touch. The neo-classical genre has been very popular in Japan since the early Malmsteen years and through the last couple of years the Japanese scene has provided us many cool new bands such as Kelly Simonz, Kim Kyung-Ho, Blindman, Maelstrom, and Vigilante. Clearly, Concerto Moon has what it takes to break it outside their native country. They have an extremely talented guitarist, a cool rhythm section, great keys, and more importantly a good vocalist and the ability to write good catchy songs. Japan has never lacked good guitarists but it seems getting good vocalists is their biggest hurdle. Luckily, Concerto Moon is covered. I've followed the band since their debut CD and I'm very pleased to see this talented band finally getting some recognition outside Japan. If you like neo-classical melodic heavy metal with huge hooks and grooves, excellent instrumentation, good melody-lines and choruses, you will have to look no further than this. Surprisingly the production is very good as well. There is no doubt that Concerto Moon deliver the goods. Although a couple of songs fail to interest me, there are enough good songs among these 14 tracks to stamp this CD under the "recommended" category.

Fans of band like Malmsteen, Nation, Narnia, Kelly Simonz, and Symphony X will have to check these guys out.

[This review originally appeared November 2002 at the ProgPower Online review site -ed.]
Tracklisting:
Prologue (1:22) / Time To Die (5:16) / Lonely Last Journey (5:54) / Fight To The Death (5:55) / Half Way To The Sun (5:50) / Rain Forest (6:54) / Unstill Night (7:17) / Live On The Memory (6:05) / Victim Of Desire (4:15) / Picture Of An Old Man (5:19) / Break It Down (4:55)

Musicians:
Takao Ozaki - vocals
Norifumi Shima - guitars
Ichiro Nagai - drums
Kohsaku Mitani - bass
Toshiyuki Koike - keyboards

Discography:
Fragments Of The Moon (1997/2000)
From Father To Sun (1998/2000)
Rain Forest (2000)
The End Of The Beginning (2001)

Genre: Melodic Metal

Origin JP

Added: December 8th 2004
Reviewer: Bjørnar Bevolden
Score:
Artist website: www.vap.co.jp/concerto/
Hits: 2785
Language: english