NOISE FLOOR

My Disappointment Number One for 2018. No, even for 2017 plus 2018! A splendid example of 'music for nothing'. Though back in mid 1990s 'it started in heaven', really. When Greg Walker discovered them and first released their debut studio album The Light on his well-known label Syn-Phonic, they were full of fantastic original ideas, and their two subsequent albums, Beware Of Darkness and The Kindness Of Strangers, were as mighty as The Light. On Day For Night, their power went down but was restored on V. After that, a series of albums of (I'd say) moderate to low interest followed, even high rated Snow does not contain enough fruitful ideas to justify its monstrous length. What occurred closer to our days? X from 2010, quite boring and unfairly noisy but including at least one truly intriguing long track, The Quiet House. Brief Nocturnes And Dreamless Sleep from 2013, too flawless to be distinctive. The Oblivion Particle from 2015, mostly a saturnalia of first-class classic prog banalities - but including three amazing, really magic tracks in a row, A Better Way To Fly, The Center Line and To Be Free Again. And what this all finally came to in 2018? It came to Noise Floor, an album that contains no soul. Now, after quarter of the century of intensive musicianship, the band evidently knows very well how to compose (and arrange, and of course play) prog music, but looks like they have nothing to compose anymore, their musical resources are exhausted. Of course their craft and skill are now unimaginably high, so high that they can easily make an impression of abundance of musical ideas even when in fact they have no ideas at all and the musical product is manufactured only by their professional skill but not by their talents. The band did their best to fill their new album with genuine classic prog sound and high energy, but the origin of that energy seems artificial.