adg211288 You Are Not Alone (2014) is the second full-length album by international symphonic metal act Suncrown. As with their debut album Follow Your Dream (2012) You Are Not Alone is an entirely self-released effort. Suncrown have an eight strong line-up featuring two vocalists (male and female), who in contrast to a lot of acts in the genre don't follow the beauty and the beast vocal format, instead both singing cleanly.

You Are Not Alone gets off to a reasonable enough start with The Beginning is Near, a power metal influenced song that in a couple of places hints at hidden brilliance, but as an album You Are Not Alone starts to fall apart at a faster speed than a typical power metal riff, as soon as next track Who Are You kicks in. The album quickly shows itself over the course of the next few songs to have the worst problems that a symphonic metal album (or any metal album come to think of it) could have; a relatively weak sound in both the symphonic and metal elements, voice-overs (during Grandfather’s Song), unnecessary balladry (during You’re Not Alone) and decidedly average vocals, at least by the male vocalist Darren Crisp. The female vocals by Juliana Furlani sound generally stronger, but unusually for a symphonic metal album such as this, the female voice plays second fiddle to the male voice.

The situation with the vocals is a poor choice and not just because the male vocals are weaker; I've long come to the conclusion that, as to why most acts in this genre have female vocalists, is because they simply work. Suncrown deserves respect for trying to be different from the crowd, however being different doesn't count for anything if the music itself doesn't deliver the goods and to say that the end result of You Are Not Alone is rather lacklustre would be an understatement.

You Are Not Alone isn't an overly long album by any means with a 51:02 duration, but it certainly feels much longer, plodding along the way it does. It's simply a drag to get through. Even the use of power metal riffs doesn't do anything to liven the proceedings up; not only are they not used enough to really help the situation, but they're just as bland and uninspired as the bulk of the release. Suncrown does keep throwing the odd passage of music in that perks me up a bit, such as the case with Sometimes This Life, but such sections are so few and far between it's really hard to keep my attention focused on the album for any length of time longer than a few minutes.

You Are Not Alone is not exactly horrible, but it's very far from being recommendable as well. It's bland and inoffensive music, really. Suncrown lacks the more aggressive take on the symphonic metal genre that a band like Epica has. They lack a folksy element such as what Leaves' Eyes have used to effect. Hell, they even lack the unashamed pop hooks of more recent Within Temptation efforts. Suncrown have given the album nothing to make it memorable the way their contemporaries do with their work, so a 1.5 star rating is all I can give.