DESTINATION’S CALLING – Invisible Walls

Destination’s Calling is a German quartet that was founded in 1999. They have released a couple of demos to date, but Invisible Walls is their first full-length effort. Being a new band in the Metal scene isn’t easy and it has taken them some time to get to the point where they are today, but they’ve worked hard and have performed at the Keep It True III festival (with Helstar, Sacred Steel and others) and shared the stage with, among others, Freedom Call, Brainstorm, Ektomorf, Majesty and Chinchilla.

Their musical style can be described as traditional Heavy Metal with elements from Power Metal; you could place them somewhere between Vanishing Point and Communic. The album is diverse and has up-tempo songs, mid-tempo songs slow, ballad-like songs. The songs are of varied quality, but those that rise above the others are great Metal songs. For instance the title track, ”Invisible Walls,” is a great song with a twin guitar driven intro and a memorable chorus. It’s the longest song on the record with its eight minutes, and that gives the band the opportunity to do long, melodic guitar solos, slow down the tempo, modulate the guitar solos and do some great vocal harmonies. This should be a killer song for their live shows, and if the crowd isn’t in on that one, then they should go home and drink their cod liver oil!

Vocalist Christian Gräter’s voice sounds very much like any Heavy/Power Metal vocalist on the scene, but he pretty much sticks to the safe mid-range while backing vocalist, Markus Göller, enriches the vocal parts with some nice harmonies. However, it would be nice and liberating if Gräter could go a little higher once in a while, because it actually becomes a little bit too similar throughout the record and it edges on being boring towards the end. It should be mentioned that there’s nothing wrong with his voice, because he sings great, it just lacks a little diversity.

What would Destination’s Calling be without drummer Christian Frank? He really makes the difference on this record and tends to make the songs more interesting. You can, for instance, hear this on the song “Bleeding Again.” The song is a “happy” ballad with slow melodic solo parts until it reaches the chorus. Here Frank does some great drumming and breaks up the song’s structure a bit. Other highlights are the album’s first real songs (apart from the intro that is) “Fallen From Grace” and “Turning Away.”

The record was recorded and mixed by Jan Vacik (Dreamscape) and mastered by Andy Horn (Edenbridge, Majesty) and they’ve done a great job. The guitars are used just right and the soundscape is so powerful which makes the fact that they use no keyboards seem unimportant (they used keyboards on all of their previous demos). The album is, as earlier mentioned, diverse and this debut album is worth checking out. There’s a lot of potential in Destination’s Calling’s music and it will be exciting to see what these boys can do in the future.

Line-up:
Christian Gräter – Vocals/Guitar
Markus Göller – Guitar/Vocals
Christian Frank – Drums
Steffen Singler – Bass

Tracklist

1. Intro
2. Fallen From Grace
3. Sinthetic
4. Trapped In Silence
5. Bleeding Again
6. Prolog
7. Invisible Walls
8. Disconnected
9. Sentenced
10. Turning Away
11. Destination’s Calling