THE DARK THIRD

I was recommended this album by a friend of mine based on my interest in Porcupine Tree, Blackfield, Pink Floyd and the likes. The immediate first impression as soon as the first song starts is good, but also heavily influenced. Expect a lot of familiar parts and sounds. But this is not a criticism, I have always been fine with showing your influences as long as you use them to develop your sound and have solid music to show for it. The melodies are strong in this album, while some guitar parts are quite derivative and tend to recur a bit too many times, its not hard to understand why they do so once you listen to the album.

My only problem is as some other reviewers mentioned, how some songs seem to go nowhere, and tend to be overly repetitive with a single line being repeated several times without really building up to anything else, this is where this band should take some lessons from other succesful prog bands. Immediately drawing a connection to say Fear of a Blank Planet by Porcupine Tree, the way a song like Anesthetize evolves into several sections and sub-sections while maintaining the overall theme and still allowing PT to play the middle section of the song alone in a show without sounding out of place is where genius lies, these guys arent quite there yet, but they certainly have potential.

Definitely a good album, but it can get tiring pretty quickly. If you are the type who can ignore lines being repeated over and over again and some really good music in between, you will enjoy it quite a bit, I for one cannot listen to The Bright ambassadors of Morning anymore even though it has some redeemable qualities in between. Four stars for a commendable effort and for executing music with heavy influence without sounding like a complete rip off, dropped one star for lack of "progression".