DEADWING

It's constantly amazing to me that people review albums based on their own preconceptions and tastes, as if failing to appeal to *their* taste makes for a bad record. For example the other day in the UK newspaper I saw a review of the new The Band career overview box set where the journalist gave it one star and said he always hated The Band. My point being that whatever someone's taste is clearly the best music of The Band is extraordinarly good. I don't like reggae but I wouldn't dimiss Bob Marley's best work as anything less than classic. On the other hand ya know it's hard to be objective about these things, and a review is after all an opinion. Well in my opinion Deadwing *is* a masterpiece. You will be hard pressed to find many other bands that continue to push the envelope about modern rock music - this has moments that people might associate with trad progressive rock (though not the cheesy aspects thank god), but on the other hand I also hear moments of pop, metal, industrial, ambience...etc. PT seem to have hardly had an interest in playing generic music of any kind, least of all progressive rock, whatever that is these days. So we should have no surprises here in the sense that PT albums continue to surprise, blending all of the above, with little regard for either the mainstream or the kind of people who only listen to albums that fall squarely into genres like "prog rock", "prog metal", or whatever. I feel that you will love this album if you think out of the box and just consider great music to be great music, period. Deadwing continues to uphold the quality (and beyond) in one of the most unique and rewarding career trajectories the music world has seen. One wonders what will come next.