What makes it sound so much like pop sometimes? Is it the melodies? Yes, to some extent but they are very much in line with what you would expect from the genre as a whole. Is it the song structure? Again yes to some extent. For the vast majority of the album its verse/chorus/solo/verse/chorus or some variation thereof. But the main driving force here is the vocals.
Christian's clean vocals sound so stupidly squeaky clean that they could easily fit into a boy band or pop-punk band without blinking an eye. It's a bit much to get used to at first but man when they clicked for me they were an indispensable part of the music... and then there are his growls.
This is one of the few singers that makes me question if it's the same person. His cleans are what they are, but his growls border from nasty to downright filthy when he does his gutterals. These are not melodeath vocals... sometimes they border on brutal death metal/slam. It's so rare to have vocals like this in melodeath, and it's the single element that pushes them well above most of the competition.
Holographic Universe itself is a competent enough album. I find that I enjoy the last third of the album much more than the first two thirds. Starting with Prism and Gate the song writing takes a huge step up and the band becomes a bit less focused on melody and more on melodic brutality. Mix in a bit of progressive metal on the title track and you have a winner.
After Holographic Universe Christian would leave the band, and in doing so it killed my interest in following them further. That said Holographic Universe is still one of the album's I'll come back to over the years when I need some competent melodeath.
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