Archive for the ‘1998’ Category
Overlife – Between Passion and Madness – 1998
1998. I was really buying a lot of music at the time betweenwhat I was selling through my online music store and what 
I was buying for myself. A lot of the stuff I was buying for myself was from Denis Gulbey at Sentinel Steel Records. Back in the old days when you could call in and jibber jabber, Denis recommended Overlife to me. So…thanks Denis!
Overlife hails from Alicante, Spain. I built their first website (long since gone) and used to correspond with Fabricio quite a bit. What really drew me to them was Leandro’s voice. Very unique and a lot of emotion. The music itself was a little sloppy in places and even the vocals seem a bit out of key sometimes, but this album is really good overall. It’s sung completely in English but I included 2 bonus tracks in Spanish. They are good European power/prog metal with a hint of wanting to sound like Dream Theater. Their later albums sounded more like DT type prog which was a turnoff for me. So, this album it is. I still listen to it a few times a year. It’s a bright memory of a darker time in my life where the death of my father and my divorce seemed to dominate my every day life.
So if you’re into the aforementioned style of power metal, I recommend this highly.
Cemetery – Reborn (Japan)
This is another Kelz turned me on to as he is the king of Japanese metal. These guys weren’t of the typical Japanese 
metal caliber. They are a little more anthemic style. While I still prefer classic Loudness and some other bands as far as Japanese metal goes, this album and their subsequent EP are really good.
I used to correspond with one of the guys quite often and he was always very excited that someone in the USA knew who they were and liked their music. I think it was their bassist, Yoshi, but my memory has faded as it was about 10 years ago. I think he died shortly after the subsequent EP “MRI” came out. I was pretty sad when I read the news about his passing.
It was so very cool as one day I came home from work and there was a small package from Japan in my mailbox. They had sent me a copy of the MRI EP. To my surprise both Kelz and I were thanked on the back cover. That was pretty cool.
The song Reach For The Sky is absolutely incredible. It has a great feel and it’s pretty sad.
hold my head up high, i will be alright
my soul will fly higher and reach for the sky
always i’m looking for the answer
never seem that i find what i am looking for
i was walking on the empty land
i could not recollect my reason to live
This CD is way out of print and I doubt there were more than a few hundred of them pressed to start with. It’s worth sharing and worth you checking out.
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