NORTH SEA ECHOES – How To Cast A Shadow

vote
7.5

• Bands:
  NORTH SEA ECHOES
• Duration: 00:42:57
• Available from: 07/24/2026
• Label:

• Metal Blade Records

Ray Alder and Jim Matheos are musicians who certainly need no introduction. The singer and guitarist of Fates Warning have linked their names to some of the most important pages of American progressive metal and, in recent years – thanks to the long silence of the parent band after the excellent “Long Day Good Night” of 2020 – they have kept the interest of their audience alive through a large series of parallel projects.
North Sea Echoes is perhaps the most intimate and personal of these, a partnership that in 2024, with “Really Good Terrible Things”, had shown a new face of the duo, made of vulnerability and rarefied melodies, far both from the cerebral architectures of Fates Warning and from metal tout court. Two years later comes “How To Cast A Shadow”, a second chapter that confirms what was done previously and also tries to broaden the emotional spectrum of the project.
The most obvious innovation concerns the entry of real drums, entrusted to Dennis Leeflang, who appears in several episodes and gives the album a physicality absent in the debut. “How to Cast a Shadow” is a slightly fuller album, at times darker, which brings the project closer to the sounds of Fates Warning without ever giving up that measure and taste for the essential that are the true trademark of North Sea Echoes.

What is fully convincing, without a doubt, is the synergy between the two protagonists, now capable of communicating with a disarming naturalness. Matheos' writing proves to be of rare elegance, always in balance between melody and atmosphere, while Alder gives us yet another masterly performance, using his voice as an expressive instrument around which the entire architecture of the songs revolves, without ever having to rely on pure power to give drama to the passages.
“I'll Leave a Light On” is probably the heaviest episode ever signed by the project, with its melancholic and dark pace; “All That Comes After” instead plays on more immediate melodic openings, with an approach that we wouldn't go so far as to define as sunny, but which certainly appears less shady than average. “A Time Of Innocence and Purpose”, however, gives us the most exciting Jim Matheos, with his guitar embroidering fragile melodies on minimal rhythmic patterns, which delicately support Alder's voice. Finally, a separate mention goes to the poignant “Villains or Saints”, a timeless ballad which perhaps represents the emotional peak of the entire work.

Everything is fine, therefore, with the exception of just one small worm that we can't put aside. The bringing of the sounds of this album closer to the Fates Warning universe is undoubtedly a joy for the band's orphaned fans, but perhaps precisely in this a subtle feeling of incompleteness emerges: the more staid and minimal approach, in fact, if on the one hand it preserves the identity of the North Sea Echoes, on the other it allows us to glimpse a potential of colors and rhythmic textures that musicians like Joey Vera and Bobby Jarzombek (not to mention Mark Zonder) could have characterize much more clearly. It is a limit that does not affect the overall quality, but which forces us to settle for a splendid, yet in some ways incomplete, project.
In the end, however, it matters little: “How to Cast a Shadow” is a high-value, elegant and deeply felt album, which confirms North Sea Echoes as one of the most interesting groups born in the shadow of Fates Warning. Alder and Matheos demonstrate once again that they have class to spare and, above all, that they still have a lot to tell.