Andrew’s Judgmental Album Reviews: Phantom Spell – Immortal’s Requiem (2022)

Here’s one of those week’s where I started looking around, threw some names on the dart board and let fate decide! We landed on, Phantom Spell: Immortal’s Requiem!

What I know isn’t much. This band is a side project of Seven Sisters frontman Kyle McNeil, oh – and they’re based out of Manchester, UK. I could look around for more notes, but that’s really all I can glean. Never hearing this project before I think the Facebook page says they’re style is somewhere between Prog Rock and Classic Metal. So…there A LOT of gray area in between there. So let’s just dive in!

Phantom Spell is: Apparently Kyle McNeil does everything, so there we go!

• Artist: Phantom Spell
• Album: Immortal’s Requiem (2022)
• Label: Independent
• Total Track Time: 31:59

Immortal’s Requiem is the song that kicks off the album, with a very church choir hymnal feel. A little echoed out 70s influence on the guitar as well. Very simple clean vocals about praying on the altar of time, as we get a bit of a tempo rise going right into the next song as a seamless segue with more prog elements. Dawn of Mind has a very Iron Maiden 7th Son of a 7th Son feeling to me, mixed with a lot more psychedelic 70s inspired prog. There’s a great gallop riff keeping the song moving forward, hence the Iron Maiden vibes, but this is really interesting. Vocally and instrumentally it reminds me more of Kansas, but musically it lives nicely in that psychedelic prog vein right now. The song also speaks of some kind of magical sentience in the blade. So the dawning of the mind, is more of a powerful awakening. So it’s hitting those cool Lord of the Rings fantasy story elements that good prog and power metal tend to work with. Especially when the song is sung from the perspective of the newly sentient sword.

Seven Sided Mirror starts off with a little bit of that crazy prog keyboard playing. I’m either waiting for a full Iron Butterfly moment or things to calm down. Okay, they calm down a little. This has a really cool breakdown in the chorus that makes it easy to sing along with the, “Ooh, seven sided mirror” – then we get some light harpsichord. So being a song which you can only assume takes place in a castle, about reflecting his fears and the mirror manifests them, probably a reference to like ‘seven deadly sins’ since it’s a seven sided mirror. But it’s still very cool. A lot of feelings of Helloween, Iron Maiden, and a little Blind Guardian. It’s still just a very cool little song, evoking imagination and the fantasy aspects that certain types of metal go down. Up the Tower is a little quicker and stays in more of a classic rock/metal approach like Dio or Black Sabbath. Lyrically this is a lot of loose imagery about keys, locks and having to go up the tower to solve the puzzle. So the song has a generally persevering tone about it, but the lyrics don’t seem to every evoke an answer, so the song is just the trip up the tower. Some successes, some failures.

Black Spire Curse is an instrumental that starts with harpsichord and then a signature jazz drum beat. So it’s this weird amalgam of medieval Jazz before we hit the first drum fill that transitions to more of this transcendental psychedelic vibe with that ever present harpsichord. I haven’t heard this much harpsichord since the last Emilie Autumn album I listened to. Not a complaint, just more a statement that it’s been years, but I do tend to enjoy the archaic instrument. Blood Becomes Sand very somber, sparse arrangement early; but when things cut in, they cut deep and help to set the atmosphere. My dorkiness comes to a head when the lyrics remind me of Final Fantasy XIV, which isn’t a bad thing, just not a thought I expected to correlate in any of these album reviews. After a little bit, the music ramps back up and we go into that Maiden-esque gallop as well as little Dr. Dog flairs, and really have a nice rocking flourish to the finish of the song. Similar to Keeper of the Seven Keys the story starts somber, punctuates the victory and celebrates the breaking of the cycle; while emphasizing a cost. So it’s just a solid fantasy rock/metal song.

I had no clue what to expect since it was one of those weeks where I wasn’t really feeling any release in particular. Since I went in relatively blind, I’ll say that I’m not upset. It mostly stays in a psychedelic prog vein, and that whole stoner/groove genre is picking up some steam from what I can tell lately. Should be cool to see if this becomes a full time band, or was this just an independent side project one and done.

Pretty solid, no real complaints as long as you like 70s psychedelic rock with a fantasy story.

Final Judgment: 7.9/10