DESCRIPTION:
Images of Eden - "Chapter I" (2001)
Melodic Progressive Metal, Hard Rock
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/imagesofeden
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Images-of-Eden/147985975233439
Web: http://www.imagesofeden.com/
Record label: http://nightmarerecords.com/
Buy: http://nightmarerecords.com/NMR/online-store/artists-a-m/pgxso-product-details/prx-790/ctx-2

DISCLAIMER: Sanctioned by Gordon Tittsworth.
LYRICS: http://songmeanings.com/songs/view/3530822107859438240/

"Autumn's End" is the finale of Images of Eden's debut Chapter I, and exemplifies the inspirational progressive metal band's propensity for finding hope within sorrow and bringing it out of sorrow. The song is about the saddening encroachment of the dead of a northern winter upon the bright joy and life of the earth, leading to personal reflections on real or metaphorical death, rebirth, and spiritual distance, a Dark Night of the Soul as it were relived anew every year. Its glacial common-time rhythm and tempo, open, fluid, highly melodic arrangements, and ebb and flow between icy rock riffs, soaring Geoff Tateian vocal melodies, frostbitten piano, and comfortingly toasty synthesizers gel together into a poignant song fitting to close the album and to comfort the mourning with the ageless promise of rebirth.

Breathy synthesizers and elegiac piano, its tone tinny and digital-sounding but oddly endearing, frame singer-lyricist Gordon Tittsworth's narrator and descend into his reflections. Spectral effects on the opening vocals lament the premature demise of summer and autumn and the all too quick passage of the year before, itself a metaphor for how fleeting life itself is. This sense is heightened as the song gains energy behind a steady main riff, flickering in and out in different forms through the remainder of the song as autumn reaches its end. Because this short year and this short earthly life seem even shorter, and even quicker to slip away, near their end, those last few days of life become a glimpse of eternity, Images of Eden as the band name suggests, to this narrator. As the days grow colder, the raven's song of nevermore seems as irresistible as the Sirens yet as sweet as ambrosia. As the sun fades on one of those last days, the sign of a new beginning becomes an omen of the inevitable end that we know is inevitable and may be waiting for with acceptance and peace, but yet sadly still seems to come all too soon. The chorus, now growing more urgent in its second repetition, is its own prayer for that acceptance and peace to descend, for heaven's bright sun to shine in the face of the last sunset. While the riff continues inexorably towards a conclusion, a lead guitar captures and elongates that moment of humble, desperate prayer, then ebbs the tension as the lilting, nostalgic, and deeply spiritual sound of the African mbira, frequently played at indigenous religious ceremonies, envelops the narrator with the answer to that prayer. Tittsworth's wife Dawn, again speaking underneath ghostly vocal effects as the narrator prepares to close his eyes in surrender to winter, quietly proclaims the narrator's final victory of acceptance. Even though winter looms right before his failing eyes, it has not, and can never, freeze all the seeds of life he planted in the world while life remained in his body: the life that comes from God, the author of life itself. He remembers the very beginning, Eden itself: a time when he was young, knew the one and only one who breathed life into him, had no worries, and he still believed. The chorus prayer is restated again, but this time in surrender to God, for Eden to resurrect in its heavenly fullness, and alternates with his final memory of Eden in the past, as it was, will be soon, and ever shall be. Four answering vocal lines of "the last sunset" to each line of reminiscence and the opening piano melody rephrased on clean guitar, then melting into silence, may bring the last sunset upon the narrator at last, but only temporarily, as he crosses from death back to life, from sunset back to sunrise, from winter back to summer, the circle complete.

With no regrets and nothing left undone, death is no enemy, but a friend, and like the winter bound to eventually end itself, death is not the end, but only a transition. That hope can keep our fires burning through every winter, even the bitterest of winters, until the winter dies and the eternal summer begins.

"Can you remember a time when you were young?
Can you remember the one and only one?
Can you remember a time without worry?
Can you remember when you still believed?"