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Visions of Atlantis have always been a third-rate band, even their best work, 2004's Cast Away, is just not that great. Despite my affection for it, I cannot look you in the eye and say it's a five-star album, because it isn't. The loss of female singer Nicole Bogner (RIP 2012) after that disc didn't help matters, and their subsequent albums have declined from that high point.

So here we have Ethera, their fifth album, and while it is better than the abortion that was Delta, it is not that great. VoA have always worked a kind of Nightwishy Power Metal vibe, with vocal duties shared between male and female singing. Male singer Mario Plank has improved enormously as the band has matured, but he also has taken on a rougher tone that makes him sound more like a generic groove or metalcore clean vocalist. Female frontwoman Maxi Nil (the second replacement for the departed Bogner) is more of a pop vocalist than an operatic singer. This makes the band sound far less like Nightwish than they used to, but it also makes them sound poppier and less like a real metal band.

Some of the songwriting on Ethera is not bad, but it lacks the spark and fantastic sweep of their classic album Cast Away and sounds way too much like trendy pop metal nonsense. This is at least not horribly unlistenable like Trinity, but it's not good either.