Көрінбейтін Шеңберлер: After Forever альбомының тарихы

Invisible Circles is the third studio album by Dutch symphonic metal band After Forever. It was released on 25 March 2004, by the small Dutch label Transmission Records. It is After Forever's first full length album since the dismissal of guitarist and composer Mark Jansen, whose musical tastes had strongly influenced the sound of their first work Prison of Desire (2000) and their successful second offering Decipher (2001). In this work After Forever choose a new musical direction, mostly revolving around elements of progressive metal instead of the gothic and symphonic metal of previous albums. The creative process for Invisible Circles took more than a year and required the use of three recording studios in the Netherlands and Germany. A long tour to support the album brought the band to some of the most important European rock festivals and to Central and South America. Invisible Circles is a concept album about the dynamics of quarrelsome families and psychological child abuse. The theme was inspired by guitarist Sander Gommans' work as an art teacher, in direct contact with dysfunctional families and teenage problems. It is also a metal opera, with a storyline that follows the lives of an abused child and her parents since her conception to adulthood. The album was received with mixed reviews, but entered the charts in the Netherlands and Belgium.

By the end of 2001, After Forever appeared as rising stars on the dynamic scene of Dutch metal, which included bands like The Gathering, Within Temptation, Gorefest and Ayreon. Their second album Decipher (2001) had received very positive reviews and their name was well known in the underground scene of the Netherlands. Critics were impressed by the remarkable musicianship of the young members of the band and in particular by Floor Jansen's vocals, both in studio and in live performances. In contrast with these premises for a bright future, the relationships within the band were not so idyllic. Soon after the release of Decipher, After Forever faced a strong creative contrast between founding member and guitarist Mark Jansen and the rest of the band. Mark Jansen had been the main composer of the band together with Sander Gommans and his love for movie soundtracks and classical music had had a strong influence on the musical style of After Forever’s first two albums, Prison of Desire (2000) and Decipher. Moreover, his interest for religious and moral themes had characterized his lyrics for many songs, often collected under a common title (e. g. The Embrace That Smothers and My Pledge of Allegiance). In the next album, Mark Jansen meant to further explore complex interactions between classical instruments, choruses in Latin and death metal elements, while Gommans and the others preferred a more direct and aggressive approach to music, retaining some elements that made the sound of the band recognizable, but expanding it in new and different directions. Quote box |quoted=true |bgcolor=#FFFFF0 |salign=center|quote=I think my story has a lot in common with the one of Morten Veland. I was also basically fired from the band.|source=–Mark Jansen which exposed the band to larger audiences and gained them even more favourable press. Further media exposure came from Floor Jansen's collaboration with Dutch multi instrumentalist and composer Arjen Anthony Lucassen, for the recording of Star One's album Space Metal and the subsequent tour in late 2002. Jansen's activities, as well as the regular jobs and studies of the After Forever band members, reduced the band's live performances for the rest of 2002 and half of 2003. It was known that the band was working at a new album from the beginning of 2003, but their first release was the EP Exordium in October 2003, containing an instrumental track, three new songs and two covers. In Jansen’s words "the EP Exordium was like an introduction to this new full length album and the subjects of the lyrics are already connected to the concept ( ) meaning they are also dealing with modern, social problems". The reviewers noticed some musical changes in the new work, but some of them suspended their judgement, waiting for a full album to express their opinions about the new course of After Forever.

The concept of Invisible Circles was shaped by After Forever's singer and lyricist Floor Jansen, taking inspiration from Sander Gommans' job as an art teacher. His daily contact with children with social and family problems had given him the desire to make people aware of these problems by incorporating their stories into songs. The plot revolves around a dysfunctional family, comprising a father, a mother, their daughter and the father's mother. The story begins with two lovers, whose relationship is running dry. They decide to have a child, which the woman believes may save their relationship ("Between Love and Fire"). The birth of a baby girl destroys in the mother her hopes for a brilliant professional career and smothers her passion. On the other hand, the newborn child causes in the father a stiffening of his feelings and the refusal to compromise his career for a "spoilt brat" ("Sins of Idealism"). The girl, perceived in the family as an unwanted burden, tries to adapt to the psychological abuse she receives, but she is the object of frequent quarrels and grows sad and depressed ("Beautiful Emptiness"). She searches for quietness and strength in her inner fantasy world, and friendship and love on the internet, becoming ever more detached from the real world and eccentric in the eyes of her schoolmates and parents ("Eccentric", "Digital Deceit", "Through Square Eyes"). The line of pain that connects the child to her parents appears indestructible and the situation gets worse when the father thinks of leaving ("Blind Pain", "Two Sides"). The intervention of the girl's grandmother reveals that the father was himself a neglected child and a victim of his family ("Victim of Choices"). The father's anger is a reaction to his abuse as a child and this realization seems to soften the girl's pain, bringing her out of her defensive shell ("Reflections"). In conclusion, the grown up daughter, now a mother herself, faces the same dilemmas of her parents and is bound to repeat her parents' mistakes, closing the invisible circle that endures from one generation to another ("Life's Vortex"). was writing the lyrics and shaping the plot for the concept album. "Digital Deceit" was the only single issued from the album and released on 20 May 2004. A high tech video clip was produced for the song by D'iMages, the same company that had done the video clip for the 2003 single "My Choice", extracted from Exordium. The video was aired on Dutch MTV and on local musical TV stations.

The artwork for the album was created by German designer Carsten Drescher and his graphics company Media Logistics. Drescher was responsible for the After Forever logo and the cover concepts of every After Forever album and single since then. The girl he photographed is in fact his daughter Aimee Drescher, who also appeared in the video clip for the song "Digital Diceit". He inserted the photos in a dark urban landscape tinted blue, completing the front cover artwork with the digital overlay of circles in the water to evoke the title of the album. The same circles were extensively used in the CD booklet Pinkpop and Dynamo festivals in Belgium and the Netherlands. The Pinkpop Festival performance on 30 May 2004, was televised for a Dutch TV station. The first leg of the tour culminated with the performance at the Wacken Open Air festival, on 7 August 2004. New dates of the tour were added at the end of the year, but some shows were cancelled when drummer André Borgman was admitted to a hospital and diagnosed with lung cancer at an initial stage. The official site of the band reported the news of Borgman’s illness and confirmed some shows, with Ayreon, Star One and Gorefest drummer Ed Warby standing in for Borgman. and Borgman was back behind his drum kit for the final leg of the Invisible Circles tour in South America in August 2005.

After the almost unanimous praise received by the album Decipher The bold move of making a concept album about such a controversial matter was generally appreciated but, as Eduardo Rivadavia said in his AllMusic review, this could be a "slightly overambitious creation". In particular, the spoken dialogue by Somerville and Lansford was generally considered badly acted and detrimental to the music which, on the contrary, was generally considered the strong point of the album. and position No. 74 in Belgium. The single "Digital Deceit" reached position No. 41 in the Single Top 100 chart in the Netherlands.