Italy’s Mirrormaze is the brainchild of Serenity bassist Fabio D’Amore, only this time; Fabio takes center stage on vocals. Stylistically, Mirrormaze is progressive metal in the tradition of bands such as Dream Theater (think ‘Awake” era DT) and Fates Warning (Fates/Redemption vocalist Ray Alder lends his voice to the song “Deeper Signs”, but more on that in a moment).

     The title for their debut album “Walkabout” refers to the legendary aboriginal spiritual trip so according to the bands bio, “Walkabout takes the listener on an intimate journey through the unknown, detaching his mind from reality and finally allowing him to take a closer look at its own dreams.” The first thing that impressed me on the album was D’Amore’s vocals. You would never know that he was not a full time singer as his voice has dynamics, emotion, and power to spare, sounding at times like former Iced Eath vocalist Matt Barlow to these ears. The music is heavy, dark, progressive, and energetic and Mirrormaze show their DT and Fates influences without ever sounding like a direct copy of either band. The musicianship and arrangements on “Walkabout” from Davide Penna (guitars), Samuele Lanfranchini (keyboards), Juan Manuel Savoini (bass) and Fabio Nasuelli (drums) is top notch. Although I enjoyed the entire album, my personal favorites include the highly melodic melancholy of “Lost In A Belief”, “Joke” which, lyrically contains many references to Heath Ledger’s Joker from Chris Nolan’s Dark Knight movie, including the tag line “Why So Serious?” and the chorus features one of Ledger’s best Joker lines ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stranger”. As I alluded to earlier, Ray Alder lends his trademark melancholy emotional voice to the track “Deeper Signs” which has some tasy lead guitar licks from Penna as well. If you close your eyes, you might think you’re actually listening to a Fates or Redemption song! “Missing” is a softer side of the band that will appeal to fans of Redemption, while D’Amore’s theatrical use of vocal vibrato reminds me of Tobias Sammet of Edguy/Avantasia. The final track “Broken Soul” has an opening riff that reminds me of Bang Tango’s “Someone Like You”, though thankfully not for long as the song goes into full progressive metal mode, a fine way to end the album and a great debut for Mirrormaze. Hopefully, this is just the start of big things for Mirrormaze when Fabio isn’t performing or recording with Serenity. I’m looking forward to chatting with him about “Walkabout” when Serenity makes their U.S. debut at ProgPower USA in September! Highly recommended album for the ProgPower nation!

Rating: 8.0