CROSSING THE SOUND

PHREEWORLD are a promising band from USA, who are playing a mixture of early YES, PINK FLOYD, GENESIS and The BEATKES with a little doze of Jazz, Magma and KING CRIMSON. The guitarist sometimes reminds of Steve HACKETT and the singer of Jon ANDERSON. They have put a lot of work behind the vocals and the song harmonies. Everybody in the band is singing and they are excellent musicians. Partially the music is very complicated with many tempo changes. The CD contains 9 tracks with various lengths between 3 to 8 minutes, but the most tracks is between 3 to 5 minutes. The sound quality isn't that good and the mixing are rather blurred. This fact is making the more complex parts of the songs quiet hard to hear witch is negative for the whole record. The CD booklet though is very beautiful and that is positive. The most memorably songs are "The Hermit", "Gates Walk", "The Empress", "Wardrums" and "The Chariot", but all tracks are good. Recommended! This is progressive rock at it's best! This is one of the better albums from 1998. Hopefully we will hear more from PHREEWORLD in the future. They deserve to break through.

Well, this American progband Phreeworld is so obscure there's even no description available at the moment. Yet there is already a review and a few ratings for this album so a few people have discovered them and I consider myself lucky to have found this album.

Ok, lucky then in the sense that this is a pretty rare one I guess, not really in the sense that it's a truly excellent piece of work. Still it's an enjoyable release with hints of Cairo (sound) and Iris/Arrakeen (guitar). I'm not going to do a song by song review because there are no interesting stories to tell about each song with exception of the last two that is. Wardrums is an almost complete rip off of one of the Momentary Lapse songs by Pink Floyd, very striking. Last and longest song of the album, The Chariot is in fact the most interesting and original composition with alternating tempo and mood shifts.

But even this song doesn't quite reach the excellent or outstanding status. There are no real disappointing tracks either on this nice release by this nice band. But that's all it is actually and therefore the only right outcome is three stars.

The North American band - PHREEWORLD - in his/v second studio albun "Crossing the Sound", presents influences of bands as YES, PINK FLOYD, GENESIS, CSN&YOUNG, BEATLES & ALAN PARSONS PROJECT, bring with this folk/space/symphonic and a small neo-prog portion. However such "raw material" doesn't get to produce (except for some few and well-known moments) a music that got my attention. In fact, most of the tracks sounded to me as something already heard previously without any increment that resembles an interesting new approach of the influences mentioned above! The "few and well-known moments the one that I referred are me due to Track 1 "Freeworld" with a cleary influence of YES & ALAN PARSONS PROJECT (the first for the keyboards and guitars and the second for the vocal ones) the track 5 "Solar Spectra" (where a guitar in Steve Hackett's style, commands the sound). As weak points, I would point the track 2 "CHINA" with a repetitive rhythm in the enttire track and The track 6 "Gates Walk" , wich begins with the style of Crosby,Stills, Nash & Young and she becomes PinkFloyd soon after, in the which I think this combination was made in a very abrupt way!!! For these reasons my rate is 2 stars.