Chronique de l'album

  After Forever nous livre avec Prison of desire, son premier opus, une œuvre d'une grande maturité musicale. Ici, de nombreux genres musicaux se côtoient avec harmonie. On peut entendre plusieurs styles de métal (gothique, symphonique, black, death) qui sont opposés à une musique classique (voix soprano, orchestre, chœurs). Dans " Mea culpa " on peut également entendre des chants grégoriens. Des élements orientaux ajoutent un peu d'exotisme à l'ensemble (comme sur "Follow in the cry" et "Black tomb").

  Sur ce disque le clavier est mis en avant et permet de créer un climat planant et mélodique (cf. "Leaden Legacy"). Les riffs de guitares apportent de l'énergie aux chansons. Le chant soprano de Floor est magnifique mais pas très varié. "Yield to temptation" a une ambiance inquiétante accentué par les chœurs et la voix gutturale de Mark.

  "Beyond me" qui clôture l'album a pour guest Sharon Den Adel de Within Temptation. Le duo Floor/Sharon fonctionne à merveille, c'est une chanson très belle, l'émotion est au rendez-vous, qui commence en douceur au clavier pour finir avec plus de punch avec l'ajout de guitares, batterie, basse et l'intervention de grunts.

  Prison of desire, pour un premier essai, est un coup de maître. A posséder !!!

  Aurélie (Arwen)

Mea Culpa
(The Embrace That Smothers - Prologue)
Music: After Forever
Lyrics: After Forever

O mi jesu, demitte nobis debita nostra,
salva nos ab igne inferiori, perduc in caelum
Omnes animas, praesertim eas,
quae misericordiae tuae maxime indigent

Sicut erat in principio
et nunc et semper et insaecula
saeculorum

Leaden Legacy
(The Embrace That Smothers - Part I)
Music: After Forever
Lyrics: After Forever

I can t look behind because I'm living in the past
Tears without emotion are filling up the unbridled hours

We cannot be
What you expect from us
We cannot see through the glasses of despair
Evade the leaden legacy

Those who separate and join the opposite
do not see that that will get them nowhere
Can't you understand it is a similar manipulation
Wake up and see the light

Doomed to wander in repressed emotions
This imaginary refuge restrains me from awakening

Fear of penance
Doomed to sycophancy

Doomed to sycophancy

Semblance of Confusion
Music: After Forever
Lyrics: After Forever

As the light's becoming more fierce and the heat is melting your heart
The fire is awakening there's an ancient fear we all know
Ominous, misleading, get entangled in yourself

It's a feeling, creeps up, deep within
Sweet taste of innocence forgotten
A semblance of confusion
The strength I need is now flowing away
The choking feeling obstructs everything

So erratic in search for the truth
The pain is strong and persists
Silence was just a diversion to come out on the hard truth again
Leaving this world of illusions seen through the eyes of the innocent
Confronted with the infinity of chaos, forcing you to rearrange

When your litanies are unheard
Phantasm becomes coldly real
There's a thin line between the world of illusion and reality
A purgatoric trip through the mirrors within you
Unconsciousness beholden

Fear to face pass the border of pain, that burning contagion
To break, conquer and find lost beauty
Rinse, the penance is over
I know now where to find the answer
Confronting unconsciousness

Black Tomb
Music: After Forever
Lyrics: After Forever

The storm sings through the mountains
While the rain is falling
A tomb opens itself and lights up the dreary dark valley
The warm spirits fill him, the enchantment of his glory past

Hear his low voice whisper
Feel his powers
Change the light of darkness
His sanctity, his strength

He will rule like before the tomb closed
Tainted souls live again
The sweet vengeance versus the black spirits of evil

Into the light, back into death, now it is time!
It will depend on the righteous or doomed
Like once before opened this tomb, for the revenge is mine

Mother of the found, king of doom
The fane of blackness, fountain of blood
Take those enthroned, their poison inside
Let them crawl till the end of time, die

Follow in the Cry
(The Embrace That Smothers - Part II)
Music: After Forever
Lyrics: After Forever

Behind your facade hides an indomitable
lust for power and tyranny
Taking advantage of your pendencies
Fear is the doom, doom of us all
Instead of exterminating the weed
We allow it to overgrow our function
All means are justified for the djihad fi sabil Allah
I embrace you, accept my soul
I shall make my life subordinate to you
Live like your rules and laws prescribe
and follow you wherever I go
Follow in the cry
Hang this heretic who's indulged in unchaste thoughts
Silence him such as the laws of the vellums prescribe
Pusillanimous massacres the order of the day
On behalf of power-hungry fundamentalists

Silence from Afar
Music: After Forever
Lyrics: After Forever

When the fate leaves you behind
and drags me of to an unknown destination
Shall my tears shape a sea
on which your boat has to reach the area

When the storm is most violent
and the horizon seems to be far away
You'll find strength to go on
and conquer the misery that wants to bring you down

When silence from afar is close at hand
our harmony becomes as elusive as time

Viribus exhaustus sentio meum finem
Meam amicam viduam relinquens

Inimical Chimera
Music: After Forever
Lyrics: After Forever

In the imperium with emerald valleys
There where endlessness encircles you

A goddess lost her aureole
Created her own domain

This valley of doom where I'm the token
She'll be throwing the dice this time

A goddess lost her aureole
Evil took over her godless soul
Swallowing you in the rivers of blood
Morbid games played with you, you token

Clouds are roaming around the pale moon
An inimical gloom covers the valleys
I'm the cephalic empress of this doomed celestial empire
Hear the orchestra of death

I wade in blood in search for my inevitable death
The dice are rolling now

Tortuous Threnody
Music: After Forever
Lyrics: After Forever

Thy gruesome cries so thin
On thus you will succeed
The amorphous illusions
Thwart your willingness to believe

The beauty disturbed

The amulet, opener of forgotten doors
Leads back to that doomed tiara-night
See thyself wild in hysteria
Death's irony

The beauty disturbed

Listen to this tortuous threnody
Filled with the pain
Thou can see where betrayal shall bring thee
Death's obligatory

Where all elements melt to one
And odious memories perish together with you
Should have seen the omen, the mirror
Death's reality

Cry, your threnody will be heard
For thy suffocated minds
The tortuous sound as angels' voices
The phobia, in search for ancestral blood

An arable force from the past
Leads back to the atrocious roots
The deep inner soul, never to be exposed

The axiom you can't deny or better
Drags you down into a lost abyss
The hymn stops, fear will reign Death's cruelty

Yield to Temptation
(The Embrace that Smothers - Part III)
Music: After Forever
Lyrics: After Forever

They told you not to yield to temptation and opened their arms...
...Make your own inferences...

Inscrutable chaos in my head
Inevitably
Greed will take its toll
Why
There's no place to hide
Let me free myself

The anathema's driving millions
together in the pustules of our earth
Greed and self-denial the cause of
unimpeded desecration of the truth

They told you not to yield to temptation
but offered you only hypocrisy and ruin

The phantom of damnation
threw her coat over humanity

Captive in the shackles of this indoctrination
depraved souls wished to be pure
Delight in deformity the last convulsions
are building up a bridge to a new era
The assumption of a faded supposition
Never shall I be a marionette !

The embrace that smothers...

Ephemeral
Music: After Forever
Lyrics: After Forever

An empty gaze reflects the contradiction
Alleged strength, so fragile
No more than compassion

Ephemeral gatherings without interaction
Be sincere and announce your departure

A vallum of fairy tales smashed into reality
Projected on the ruins of a castle in the air

Beyond Me
Music: After Forever
Lyrics: After Forever

I know I'm alone, but somebody's watching me
Follows me everywhere I go
A cold flow surprised me again, I shiver
The presence of something, I can hear it's breathing

Leave me alone, wherever you came from
Hearing so much voices, no one's talking

Running for something, nothing, in the black of the night
Creeps around you, the invisible force that makes you crazy
I can't remember how it feels to be warm, to be alone...
Without that fear deep inside me

Icons of death float on beyond me
whispering my name and breathing my fear

The menace of insanity
Inner voices cry out for action
Defenceless as I am
Lost in the alleged paradise

I'm not sure if I am here or elsewhere
Searching for satisfaction
Beyond the frontiers of my comprehension

Wings of Illusion
Music: After Forever
Lyrics: After Forever

Silence breaks in me
Liar
Screams out
Erodes my soul and wakes me up
Silence was my rest
Conjurer
Reality
The odium bursts out in me

It came towards me and made me believe
Made me see
I was the wing, the lie, that shadowed me
Made me blind
To face the time that I am

Hide me from me
Liar
Hide me, the truth has just woke me up...
Has woke me up

It came towards me and made me believe
Made me see
I was the wing, the lie, that shadowed me
Made me blind
To face the time that I am

Hide me, realise, the truth has just began
Hide me, and from my heart
I'll never see my face like before

Hide me from me 'cause of the scorned sins of my soul
Fill these holes with eyes
Mine are not mine

Silent screams pronouncing false prophecies
Hide me from me

Oh, come, come inside of me
Feel the sophisticated tendencies of my thoughts

Unspoken words circling to be thrown into disorder
Leaving a patron of insanity

Carved into stone, not to be forgotten
To collide because of my nakedness

The all embracing frailty I never knew
Evokes a sphere of fallacies
Like a spiral down, down to deep tunnels of despair