The first actual song on here, "Lifeforce," is progressive neoclassical metal with some nice shredding, and then "Apollo's Northern Land" is a much mellower prog. metal/prog rock piece. After that, while there's still some shreddy guitarwork here and there, the album largely shifts away from anything particularly heavy and/or metal. The last track does pick up with enough neoclassical guitarwork that I wouldn't argue if someone called it shred.
The bulk of the album is guitar-centric progressive rock, and with Arnaud's obvious love of ethnic melodies (such as the electric sitar use in "The Truth Behind Horus"), several songs exhibit a lot of world music influence, often bordering on some sort of progressive/ambient fusion. Often not very appropriate for the scope of this blog, but pleasant musically.
However, while Arnaud may be a talented guitarist and multi-instrumentalist, his vocals are plain and sub-par. "Lifeforce" could have been improved with a stronger singer, but since there aren't any super compelling vocal lines here anyway and several tracks (which tend to be more interesting) are already vocal-less, I think the album would have benefited from being completely instrumental.
Also should add the booklet has two pages of text with some new age-sounding diatribe (the lyrics also vaguely lean towards those types of topics, although no more than a lot of power metal bands do). Not really clear how serious it's supposed to be or whether it's an attempt to artificially inject the album with some sort of spirituality to make it seem deeper. I mention this because while the various world melodies somewhat play into this concept, I would have expected a far more psychedelic album from reading through the booklet.
Not something I'd put on if I needed a metal or even a shred fix, but I could see revisiting it in the future as mellower background music.
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