Review HOLLOW ‘Tower’

When it comes to Swedish metal outfit Hollow, it was the 1997 debut album ‘Modern Cathedral’ that grabbed my attention. The quartet unleashed with their sophomore release another well-crafted record that combined power metal with a nicely integrate progressive touch. Unfortunately, ‘Architect of the Mind’ was the last album of the first era and the band disbanded the same year.

Hollow returned in 2018 with an album I missed. ‘Between Eternities of Darkness’ is the title of the third album that gets now with ‘Tower’ a successor.

Hollow these days, that is pretty much Andreas Stoltz, being the driving force behind the band. With Stalder Zantos he found a drummer who provided a solid beat already for the third Hollow record.

When ‘Tower’ was flying into my inbox, expectations have been high, mainly due to some memories of 1999 that awoke. After having listened to the new album a few times I must conclude that expectations and reality isn’t a match. Songwriting and flow of the album isn’t what was to expect. None of the first three songs has the potential to create enthusiasm and stand symbolic for the entire album. It’s more of a scattered picture that doesn’t attract as much as the band has shown in the past. It is more of fragments being put together under the header of progressiveness.

I was hoping that the songs on ‘Tower’ need a while to unfold a certain beauty, but they didn’t. There are small signs of hope appearing while listening to songs like ‘Sunrise’, but in general the conclusion is, that ‘Tower’ can’t really compete with the own band discography nor with genre-related other releases.