Short Reviews [Cryptex - 2020 - "Once Upon a Time"]

This is the fourth album from German band Cryptex, and for this one Simon Moskon (lead vocals, keyboards) and Marc Andrejkovits (bass, backing vocals) have been joined by Andre Jean Henri Mertens (guitars, backing vocals) and drummer Simon Schroder. The band has managed to gain a lot of fans across wide musical spectrums, and they have played more than 250 concerts in 23 European countries, have played in the States, have headlined their own tours and have supported bands as musically diverse as Pain Of Salvation, Threshold and Alice Cooper. Their own style is that of crossover progressive rock, moving into melodic hard rock territory and new guitarist Mertens has come in as a songwriter and has had an immediate impact. It is an album mostly of shorter material, with only a few of the twelve songs longer than five minutes, and it is based around Moskon’s vocals and songs with great hooks. The keyboards in question are often piano, but they can switch from something which is mostly Moskon accompanying himself to a band playing full on melodic rock, blurring the boundaries as to what is progressive rock and what is melodic radio friendly hard rock. It is an incredibly easy album to get inside, one which can be enjoyed the very first time it is played and just keeps getting better. It does feel quite lightweight in some respects, with little in the way of real depth, but what you hear is what you get, and the result is something which is just fun. I’m not so sure about the song “Body Language” where they try to push themselves into a slightly more serious area, with a voiceover, but when they stay lighter, then this quite an enjoyable album.