ODYSSEY

It's been a few years since ILLENIUM has dropped and I can't say you could really tell it's been that long. These tracks could have been made at the same time as his self-titled effort and I would not have known the difference. For a three year gap, I was really hoping for more development, especially given how formulaic the electronic genre is right now. Not sure if this is too many hands in the pot given the TWENTY-THREE different producers that worked on this behemoth. A little stat breakdown of producers per album. "Ashes": 1. "Awake": 3. "Ascend": 11. Starting to get a bit excessive. "Fallen Embers": 12. "Illenium": 11. "Odyssey": TWENTY-THREE! Where even is ILLENIUM here? There are more producers than tracks. This many different people working on something that ILLENIUM could have made with Dabin is insane. It still sounds nice and pretty and polished though. Like to a tee. This album could be a baseline for AI learning languages to produce this genre. It is all "perfect" in the most boring way. My favorite song from his last album was "Shivering". Great change to the typical pace of his genre and perfectly mixes a harder rock style featuring Spiritbox. I think it was pretty apparent that he had struck a new working medium and this time he returned with two more attempts at this. "Slave to the Rithm" with Bring Me The Horizon and "War" with Lo Spirit. "amo" by BMTH is one of my all time favorites due to it's excellent mixture of rock and the electronic sound sweeping the airwaves at the time of it's release. Maybe not a BMTH diehard fan fave, but to me it's timeless. Seeing them on here gave me an optimistic outlook. Hearing the song was somewhat opposite. The mixing on this rock-edm hybrid must be a nightmare to do, even with 23 people, with all the blazing synths, screaming vocals, and heavy guitar. So the beginning of the song suffers heavily. As far as the rest of it, the magic just isn't there like on "Shivering". "War" does pull this off a bit better but I still doesn't capture that same flame. The features slathered across here have quite the track record and I'm sure ILLENIUM is aware of the different crowds he is pulling with these. Mako, Ryan Tedder from OneRepublic, Elley Duhe, Zeds Dead, Dean Lewis, Bastille, Dabin, Alok, the aforementioned Bring Me The Horizon. He even got Kid Cudi. The wide range of vocal style is what does keep the run time refreshing. Just a ton of people with great voices that are easy to listen to. "I'll Come Runnin" did catch my ear as I'm down bad for Zeds Dead's production style. "Not Ordinary" with Kid Cudi also accomplishes what it needs to for me. It doesn't embrace the wall of music a lot of these other songs have. Don't get me wrong though, it still has that big production feel to it. I'm not quite sure if ILLENIUM will ever do anything different. I simply ask for one excellent song each album. As long as I get that, I'll be happy.