BANTAM TO BEHEMOTH

This album is furious. Right from the get-go, this album starts to swing you by your ears with frantic musicianship of the highest quality. The overall sound here is like a mixture of The Mars Volta and King Crimson.

I honestly hoped to enjoy this album quite a bit, because I read somewhere that this was very jazz-fusion inspired eclectic progressive rock. I don't read much from the jazz-fusion area on this album, but it does sound to me like a much more frantic and sax-strong Red-era King Crimson. There is some jazz influence here, but mostly of the post-bop variety. The production on this album is some of the worst I've ever heard. It sounds like they wanted to make this album sound vintage, but it came out sounding like vintage and recorded in someone's garage. The sparse vocals are buried so deep in the mix that whatever the lyrics are, they are completely incomprehensible.

This is a decent listen, but I wouldn't really recommend it to too many people.