Old Routes - New Waters

Austria's Visions of Atlantis had a decent career as a Nightwish clone going until their last album, 2013's Ethera, found them straying too far from the formula and the fans reacted negatively. The band cleaned house in 2016 with only drummer Thomas Caser surviving the purge. The new lineup, featuring former Serenity singer Clementine Delauney and Dragony vocalist Siegfried Samer went with rerecording some older material prior to producing anything new. Old Routes - New Waters contains five songs taken from the band's first three albums and, as you might expect, finds Visions of Atlantis returning to their Symphonic Metal origins. Gone are the Broadway vocal lines and emo keyboards and left are crisp guitars, classically inspired keyboards and excellent vocal lines. I'll leave it up to you if you need to own this EP. I haven't heard the original songs but I can't imagine these are all that different and it does give me hope for the band's next album.