Holy Graal: "Just A Signal"

Indie 1999

Review by Petri Kautto 28 October 2002

Holy Graal is a French prog metal band that was founded over ten years ago. Too bad that during the ten years they’ve been around they’ve not been able to come up with a solid production for their demo “Just a Signal”. The first thing that slaps you in the face with this 4 song disc is the poor quality of the production. But that’s not all there is to it.

Prog metal has never really been my cup of tea and Holy Graal is not going to make me a prog metal fan either. I listened to their CD for quite a while and got an impression that Holy Graal, Fatima Taamallah (vocals), Frederic Guionnet (guitars), Frederic Isnard (vocals and bass), Gil Pinate (keyboards), and Cyril Tosquellas (drums) are a talented bunch of musicians that might have something going for the prog metal fans if given a decent opportunity to record and release an album. Nothing shockingly exciting but a decent performance anyway.

As mentioned there are four songs on their demo. My favorites were a quite rocking tune called “Birds” that slowed down every once in a while only to rise up again, and a bit more mysterious song “Global Awareness”. In most of the songs the keyboards had a bit 70’s sound. It worked out OK at times but mostly it was a bit annoying. Overall this was an interesting record, it remains to be seen what happens in the future.

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