DOUBLE VISION

Another album in the line of similarly-sounding recent Arena releases - slick, but safe, for them, spinning pompously vague tales of the supernatural and fallibility of reality in a heavy adult-oriented rock fashion. The songs are catchy, to be sure, but predictable, made from familiar ingredients - a loud riff (the intro to Zhivago Wolf even made me think that this was going to be Arena's most metal album, but, thankfully, no), a spacey break, a softer vocal-driven verse, a wailing guitar. The listener is also treated with Arena's longest track - a 22-minute epic. Which is, well, an OK epic, more diverse than the rest, but not yet a magnum opus. Like the Unquiet Sky album, it is best thought of as a story set to music, something, it seems to me, that Mr. Nolan has been lately most interested in.