If you chance upon Morning’s website, two things should become apparent. Firstly, this band describes their music as ‘dream metal’, which is an irritatingly meaningless and pretentious way of describing it. Oh hang on, that means "a mix from atmospheric pop, progressive rock and heavy fantasy metal", apparently. My mistake.

Whatever you want to call it, Morning’s music is hardly metal at all, it’s more of a wannabe, hanging around the outside of the metal arena and clamouring at the gates, longing for a piece of the action but without the methods or means to get inside and play with the big boys [or girls, for that matter]. Secondly, there is also a proud boast on the front page of the site that says Circle of Power sold out! Yes! Hurrah. Well, that would happen if you only pressed 200 copies of the EP. It would be rather embarrassing if it didn’t.

The unusual thing about Morning is the strange cereal of individuals that make up for its band members. This motley crew of Dutch misfits range from the ages of 15 to 26 and look like they met at some kind of counselling group. In spite of this, they’re not bad musicians, although a little limited, but then, so are Lacuna Coil. Still, Morning’s limitations as musicians don’t matter too much since they can make a decent sound with what they’ve got. It’s just a shame that Saskia can’t sing for toffee. Her voice is clear and confident, but it has trouble finding the right notes in the right places. Apparently she is ‘on her way to competing with the big voices of her country’. Is she?? She can compete all she likes, but against talents such as Floor, Anneke, Astrid or Sharon, she doesn’t stand a chance.

There are a couple of good songs here, Seal Of Solomon has its haunting moments and Circle Of Power has some nice crunchy guitars and is a respectable atmospheric number, which would possibly deserve a rerecording [vis a vis Nightwish’s Astral Romance] when the band gets more competent. There’s also the token shallow and jangly clean-guitar number going into full-on distortion-ville to finish the album. Apart from that, the rest of the album is pretty unremarkable and shouldn’t bother any listener too much, it’s hardly the kind of material which will make an impression on anyone’s life. Nevertheless, there is talent lurking somewhere in the song-writing and musicianship, but it’ll take a bit of effort before it shows itself.

I’d like to say that Morning have the ability to be a promising band in the metal scene, but I just don’t believe it yet. Their sound is too general [maybe ‘dream metal’ actually means ‘we couldn’t think of what to play so we thought we’d copy everyone else’], the vocals are too mediocre and the songs are neither here nor there. The only way that this lot will get anywhere at the moment is if some gullible or desperate major label gets behind them and propels them into superstardom, but that would be like putting all your chips on one number in roulette. A gamble really not worth taking.