THE CLOSING CHRONICLES

Nightingale seems to have been conceived as a side-project for Dan Swano to get out all the musical ideas he wants to play with which don't fit his main projects; the first Nightigale album, The Breathing Shadow, is reportedly a mildly proggy goth rock album, whereas this time around the goth influence is restricted more or less solely to Swano's vocal delivery. Musically speaking, the rest of The Closing Chronicles is a sort of light prog metal which goes easy on the progginess - there's just enough mainstream prog metal motifs to convince me that the album hasn't been misfiled, but not enough to really satisfy fans who like their prog metal to be really, really proggy - there isn't any technical pyrotechnics to the extent that you'd get even on a Dream Theater album from around this period. For my part, though I'm not into progginess for its own sake, the album seems to be rather half-baked to me - as though it's a collection of ideas which weren't just not stylistically appropriate for Edge of Sanity, but also just plain weren't good enough.