Forever Orion is a relatively new two piece progressive metalcore band consisting of Julian Rodriguez (guitarist for Elitist) and Chris Balay. Julian does the guitars, drumming, bass, production, composition, and engineering, while Chris takes care of most of the vocals. Their new full length, Passion. Love. Harmony., was released on December 15th. The guitar parts on the album feature the ever-growing popular style of metalcore with melodic riffs and a muddy tone. The clean vocals are decent, and at times they are similar to Killswitch Engage, but the album would be a bit more appealing to me without the singing. I usually like the variance of vocals, but Forever Orion’s clean vocals turn me off sometimes. The stand out tracks on the album are Answers, Love, Harmony, and the instrumental version of Answers. Answers is a really good song, but the instrumental version of it is much better, because you really get to appreciate the fantastic musicianship in the song. My personal favourite is Harmony. The guitar leads are really good, the screaming is solid, and so too is the drumming and singing. Passion. Love. Harmony. was a mediocre release and it was not put together near as well as Erra’s new album, Impulse. Impulse flowed very well and didn’t really have a lot of filler between tracks or throughout the tracks. This, on the other hand, is half instrumental tracks (yes, you read that correctly) and some of the tracks that actually do feature vocals are instrumentally dominant. Perhaps my expectations were just a little too high for this album because the two tracks (Answers and Harmony) that I heard prior to the release, both sounded great. Sadly, they were two of the best ones on the album.
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