ON THIS PERFECT DAY

Guilt Machine

Progressive Metal

3.91 | 201 ratings

From Progarchives.com, the ultimate progressive rock music website

I pondered whether to give this a 3 star or a 4 star before I rated it, but I decided on 3, mainly because while it's good, well... it's not essential, like the rating thing said.

I'll say one thing right up front and that is that Ayreon is MUCH better than Guilt Machine, and so is Star One. Guilt Machine was very artistic and the differences I noticed immediately were that it probably sounded a lot different than any other Arjen Projects. A lot of the classic Arjen has dispersed, appearing once in a while, mostly in the Guitars and Keyboards.

This album makes great background music, but on its own it has some faults... I'm actually surprised I'm giving an Arjen Lucassen project anything less than a 5, because Arjen is... well AMAZING, and Guilt Machine is good... but not AMAZING. What I'm saying is, while the album is good in a general sense, it has a legacy to live up to, and in my opinion, fails to.

If you enjoy Opeth, especially their quiet progressive passages between bouts of extreme prog-death metal, then you'd enjoy this album. A lot of the album was like those quiet parts of Opeth songs. It was very interesting, but it was also very slooooooow. Heavy Metal is characterized often by speed, heaviness, and aggression. This album doesn't really have any of that... in fact I hardly consider it metal at all... it just happens to have the distorted guitars of metal, but in reality I'd label it progressive/atmospheric rock. As a consequence of being very slow and melancholy, it gets kinda boring to be honest. There are no memorable things to find on this album... I admit, this is only my second time listening to it, but there always has to be a hook of sorts. I'll say straight out that the first two songs were very boring to me and were not very good to put at the beginning as people might get tired and stop listening. The next to songs after them though are really good. I liked them a lot. The songs after those are ok, I liked Perfection? also.

Another thing about this album is the dark and quiet sound that it has... almost like hopelessness. To be honest it kinda makes me depressed hearing it. I wouldn't dare listening to it while I was sad or guilty. I haven't really paid attention to the lyrics yet, but they address guilt and inner emotions too. Written by Lori Linstruth. You can definitely tell that Arjen didn't write these lyrics from the start.

Well I can safely say that I hardly remember anything from that album. It's a shame, this review sounds like a bad review but it's not. The album is a good album. Go ahead and get it, I recommend it, especially if you're an Arjen fan, or if you like Opeth's atmospheric passages. But personally, I was having higher expectations from something from Arjen and perhaps that's because I was expecting a variety of voices and instruments and stuff like Ayreon...

So in a nutshell... the album is very dark, slow, and complex. If you're looking for another Ayreon, you won't find it here. Overall it's a good album, but it's not essential to everyone's progressive rock collection.

HammerOfPink | 3/5 | 2009-9-4

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