DOOMSDAY AFTERNOON

The first impression was the extravagant cover and the carefully mastered booklet. The second impression was the rather pop-ish first seconds. But after the first minute these starting moment began to make sence and the wonderful mood that works itself through the whole album was already present.

Although the songs don't go into each other without a pause, they hang together in a really pleasant way. Especially the repetition of certain phrases á la I'll wait for you brings memory of previous musical moments over and over again. But the most interesting thing is that I couldn't even name one certain song from the whole CD by heart although I've listened to this CD at least 2 times a day for the last month. The reason for this is the pleasant complexity and easyness that flows through the whole album, which just makes you listen to the complete thing without wanting to skip a song. What I'm trying to say is: This is how a concept album should be! The compositions itself are absolutely wonderful. The inclusion of the orchester was really perfectly mastered. There are absolutely no unnessecary bombastic elements that are not unusual in concept albums with orchestration and the classical instruments are added to the band in an enjoyable way.

The singing is absolutely perfect! The male singers (I can't even tell when another person is singing although there are several singers listed - to me it's just one male voice and one female voice) reach the higher tones with remarkable ease and surprisingly the range also reaches to a very moody low register. The female voices are also just marvellous.

The band instrumentation is kept in the background during most of the album except for the powerful instrumental the doctrine of eternal ice (part one) where the keys really take the stage. The rest of the album is mostly dominated by voice or moody surfaces with several instruments in the balance.

Part 2 (Track 6-10) of the album mainly deals with already known musical and lyrical variations from the first part, which creates a wonderful element of where have i heard this before?. The album never gets boring even though its length exceeds the 60 minutes limit. The suspense keeps on right until there is a quite unexpected pause right before the grand finale microdeath softstar wich starts with the rhytmically unexplainably appealing 10/8 measures that leads through a musical journey of the concept right to the powerful endlines: all we need is time but time's too damned unkind. Everytime I have listened to the CD and those lines appear, I think to myself that grandious music is still alive!

It' really hard to compare Doomsday Afternoon to anything I've heard before. I guess the closest to it is probably Supper's Ready by Genesis or some stuff from the first two Nektar-albums.

Barly have I listened to an album of this calibre. This is a world-class Concept Album and a must-have for every Progressive Rock-fan out there!

Full five stars for this piece of art

Share this PHIDEAUX review

Social review comments () BETA

---

---

Review related links

• Send comments to Alfi
• Report this review (#156867)
• Buy PHIDEAUX music online with PA partners
• Show all PHIDEAUX MP3/Stream
• Go to PHIDEAUX page for videos, full discography with ratings, reviews and much more
• Go to Doomsday Afternoon page for more details, where to buy and ratings/reviews
• Search the Forum for PHIDEAUX related discussions