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Hollow were one of the lesser-known acts of the Swedish Power Metal scene in the '90s, often being compared to country mates Morgana LeFay and Tad Morose without ever getting the same level of cult appeal they did. I can't say I'm familiar with their early work, but their sophomore album, Architect of the Mind, is sometimes heralded as a lost classic of the scene, so I was curious to see what they were up to recently after getting this promo in my inbox.

Tower shows the band working in a now old-fashioned style of prog-tinged Power Metal not too dissimilar to the bands they're often compared with, particularly older Tad Morose if you dropped the keyboards. The musicianship is solid and sometimes impressive, with chugging guitar work that sports some real melodic depth to it and vocals that are high-pitched and professionally delivered. The songwriting is fairly dense and often percussive while occasionally stopping for more melodic acoustic sections, all without ever losing focus or getting oversaturated, making this an easy listening experience throughout its brief runtime.

However, every song on here is generally mid-paced and rarely varies itself beyond that, which can make them kind of blend together as the album goes on. The fact every song is fairly uniform in length doesn't help that either, with all of them being roughly 3-4 minutes and some of them being a little undercooked because of it. This is likely intentional for the sake of the album's story about inner and outer freedoms as you grow through life, which is told well enough and comes with some solid lyrics to hold it together, but in this case, it ends up dulling the impact a little bit.

Really, the most damning thing I can say here is that this album is good at many things but not great at any one of them. I don't know how fans of their older material will treat this, but if you want some solid proggy Power Metal like the Swedes used to make back in the '90s, then this is good enough.