THE WHIRLWIND

I found this at the local record store the day this came out and was in for a very plesant suprise. After waiting several years for Transatlantic's new album to come out I finally was able to hear another superb album from such a great supergroup. I was pretty intimidated by the 77 minute epic at first because it's not an easy amount of music to digest as well as the fact that it hard to keep the listeners attention for so long, but I think Transatlantic pulled it off.

What I really liked about this album is that it felt like there was even more input from the other members that their last two albums, especially the first one. There seemed to be even more influence from Stolt which in my eyes is not a bad thing. He has a lot more singing parts than he did before as well. Pete does a great job with the bass work throwing down some great lines all over the place. Morse and Portnoy gave their usual incredible performance, and i'm suprised that the band was able to hold together so well after a break from all these years

The epic piece, The Whirlwind, is one heck of an adventure! The choruses are more catchy than usual in some sections, and the insturmental sections work very nicely and it flowed well as one whole piece rather than feeling like a multi-parted suite. Of the 77 minutes as a whole, i found maybe 5 or so minutes that weren't up to the standard of the rest of the piece, but by no means were they bad! 72 out of 77 minutes of great music is fine with me. The bonus disc was also great as well. Especially the song Spinning which i found to be the other strongest piece. It has a great middle section that must be heard. The covers aren't bad themselves, and I know people are going to be especially intruiged with "Return of the Giant Hogweed" a Genesis cover. While maybe not as good as the original, it was still a good, fun, effort. Overall I give Transatlantics latest release 4.6 stars which rounds to 5.