XXV

Reduced is the Pink Floydian spaceousness, upped the hard rock guitar. But the end result is not as heavy, pounding bombast in the vein of the recent neo-prog trend (Arena, Pendragon) as you'd expect from some of the reviews. Rather, the tone of the album is dark and bitter. This is still recognizably Pallas, dramatic and slow (for the most part, with perhaps the exception of the end of Crash and Burn where they just grind it away on guitars and synths). My problem with this album is not that's a departure from the Pallas we know and love, and songs are simpler. It's that in half the songs there is little going on. It seems as if music is sacrificed to the story concept here. Sometimes it works, such as on Somewhere in the deep, with its lone slow synths and a mourning vocal, but other times it doesn't. The second part of the album in particular.