The life of a reviewer is not always great and sometimes you’ll have to do things that aren’t quite your cup of tea. Reviewing this album of Xandria is something like that. Due to the long list of reviews nowadays everybody on Metalrage.com has to make sacrifices and Xandria is my sacrifice. I’d never heard of the band before and although they had some albums in the charts in their home country they didn’t build up a name outside of Germany. Xandria was founded in 1997 and has just released their fourth album called Salome: The Seventh Veil.

 

After doing some research on the world wide internet I found why Salome sounded so familiar with me. She was the person who danced the dance of The Seven Veils in front of king Herod which eventually ended up in the death of John The Baptist. Well enough bible lessons for today. On their own site Xandria stated that this album is loosely based upon this story.

 

The precessor of Salome: The Seventh Veil, called India, had some mystical Eastern influences along the album and with this new album this hasn’t changed a bit. Starting with ´Save My Life’ and ‘Vampire’ it’s immediately obvious one of their main influences has to be Nightwish.

 

As for the music itself I have to say that they have some great songs on the album. Especially the titeltrack ‘Salome’ which switches from quiet to bombastic to quiet to almost epic proportions. With ‘Sisters Of The Night’ Xandria show they can also write more commercial type of songs with some special Eastern influences. After this there’s even a piano ballad on the album. This song, called ‘The Wind And The Ocean’, is probably also one of most outstanding songs on the album.

 

Overall the gothic rock of Xandria is most suitable for your gothic girl next door. This of course doesn’t mean that there aren’t any good songs on the album. Especially the songs mentioned above make the album worthwhile. As for the rest of the songs, they're not bad but most of the time I have the idea it’s been done before.