LIBERATION

For those who haven't read my previous review for this band: it's unbelievable that such a high quality prog metal band is so little known (or at least reviewed). So again I have to say: wake up, progmetallists of this website and do your job ! This band absolutely deserves that.

So, got that off my chest, now I can do my own review. Liberation is the successor of Great Divide, one of the few in prog history that got my highest reward: 5 stars (and: totally deserved). The successor has proved to be very worthy for this bands reputation. It's another excellent effort and I wanted to review it for a long time but problem is the often occurring dilemma for the 4 or 5 star rating. I mean this must be at least the 20th case in which this problem is causing me headaches what to do. This is thus another plead for the half-star ratingpossibility that would end this pressing problem.

On this fantastic release I can detect at least 5 great songs, only downside is they can't quite match up with the best tracks of their debut. So that explains my doubts about the 4 or 5 star rating. I would do them a bit wrong with 4 stars, but another 5 would probably be a little overdone. So here we go again, it will be 4 because of the lacking oftrue masterpiece status but I'm very unhappy about it !

Ice Age is a high quality and very technical prog metal band producing very good compositions. The overall final judgement for this band is that it's one of the best in this department, to me absolutely a match for Dream Theater and Symphony X although the similarity with these bands isn't really obvious.

Best tracks on the album are: The Lhasa Road, Musical Cages and To say goodbye pt.3