THE PROG WORLD ORCHESTRA: A PROGGY CHRISTMAS

I bought this because I'm a fan of Neal Morse and I thought it would be a fun album - which it is, but compared to the rest of his output it's a little disappointing. The highlights for me are Joy To The World (sounds a bit like Mike Oldfield), the Little Drummer Boy (who is all grown up and now plays like Mike Portnoy!), and Hark The Herald Angels Sing. Frankincense is a mash- up of Edgar Winter's Franskenstein and some Christmas jingles, and is good fun, whilst the final track merges Silent Night with Transatlantic's We All Need Some Light to great effect. However this last track would have been much better with vocals, and that's one of my criticisms of this album - all but two of the tracks are instrumentals. My other criticism is that a couple of the tracks are quite cheesy and not at all proggy.

I would say about half the tracks are good to great, the rest mediocre.