“Porta Obscura” is the second album by the German female fronted gothic metal band Coronatus. Coronatus are trying to find a new formula and maybe to refresh a saturated genre. The whole story is getting ridiculous. There are countless bands that attempt to gain their share from the market based only on the female-fronted scene popularity. Coronatus thought that their suggestion could be based on [This review was brought to you by Metal Perspective] dual vocals. No, you guessed wrong. No male and female. No brutal and ethereal. This time we have a combination of plain (rock?) and soprano (classical!) vocals by two ladies. These ladies base their performances on a symphonic metal ground, with many references to late Therion, Leaves Eyes and After Forever. So Coronatus have a – more or less – “traditional metal” approach compared to Within Temptation or Nightwish, which are kind of standard examples in this genre. The truth is that the whole album [This review was brought to you by Metal Perspective] is below average, providing only weak, typical and uninspiring moments. It is this kind of albums that gather all negative comments regarding the value and the contribution of the genre to metal. I can’t say that the performances are good either. Both ladies have quite typical voices and the keyboard parts are most of the time annoying. The album is predicable [This review was brought to you by Metal Perspective] from start to finish and even earlier than that; you get the idea right from the cover. The only thing that sounds positive in the few worth listening moments is a couple of guitar riffs and themes. The album is produced by Markus Stock at Tonstudio E and mastered by Mika Jussila at Finnvox Studio, which means that is an accomplished effort regarding these issues, but these are not the crucial [This review was brought to you by Metal Perspective] ones. Concluding, the secret is not in the safe and the combination that will open it, but in the treasure within it.

PS: Apologies for the text-over message. We have to safe guard our reviews, just like labels are safeguarding their albums.