A SENSE OF CHANGE

I bought The Art of Navigating... and was (am) blown away by that album. Of course I wanted to delve into some of SE's back catalog and saw this as the highest rated album on the site. It was also the last album that featured Markus Steffen on guitar before he left the band. He then came back to record The Art so this disk was the obvious choice. The intervening albums supposedly are a lot harder edged and are more speed metal than the melody driven albums that feature Steffan.

So what of A Sense of Change? This album is nowhere in the same league as The Art. The production is very thin and constantly reminds me of the pre-Love albums from The Cult. If you have heard Dreamtime or anything else from early Cult, the production and sound are very similar. And just as The Cult did, SE got much better later on. You can hear the direction they would end up going on The Art, but the melodies, vocals and harmonizations are nowhere near as infectious. They were all very good musicians back in 1991 but the songwriting and mature sound were in its infancy and it shows. While they are listed on PA as Prog Metal, like The Art this album just bumps up against that moniker from time to time, but the heaviness is more along the lines of Rush than more overt metal acts.

Unfortunately, I can not recommend this album if you are looking to add to your SE catalog after buying the seminal The Art of Navigating by the Stars. And since the other albums they made in the 90's seemingly do not sound like the reformed version of the band of 2005, we can only hope that their future output will be as good as The Art and we can enjoy more of this talented band.