Dreaming Neon Black

Unlike its predecessor, The Politics of Ecstasy, this album is full of slow, emotional songs, and the whole of it follows a single story. Singer Warrel Dane has called that story a very simple one: a man loses a woman he was close to and slowly goes insane. Denial, self-blame, blaming God and then denouncing God — each stage of the madness is set out in a song. The ending, in his description, is tragic and more than a little depressing. The story comes from Dane's own life. A former girlfriend, Patricia Candace Walsh, cut off contact when she joined a religious group and was never heard from again. Putting private material of that kind over technical guitar work and structures inherited from power metal gives this record a weight that none of the band's others have. The running order here is the original's as printed.