EST

A nice little creation from this Canadian outfit; with a surprising evolvement.

The opening tracks on this production may lead many potential listeners to draw hasty conclusions though; with the opening number a Genesis clone and the following number exploring a symphonic rock tradition pretty close to Camel. Unoriginal, but very well made - compelling despite the many musical similarities to other acts.

The rest of this album is done following more of an art rock exploration though, maintaining some of the symphonic elements from the onset but now mixing them with stylistic leanings closer to Kansas at first, and then venturing into musical landscapes with greater similarities to acts like Trooper, Magnum and Rush; the latter in particular comes across as a strong influence for this outfit. Some riff patterns and quite a few bass lines could have been lifted from albums made by this Canadian trio; but they are placed in a context which makes them sound intriguing rather than poor replications; with symphonic art rock being the closest I can get in terms of describing the musical explorations.

Well worth checking out - with a particular recommendation for the epic tune Soldat.

First 25 seconds of this album Est strongly remind me of one of the more well known Glass Hammer songs (Maker of Crowns) with the wonderful piano tones but after this half minute the comparison goes astray when French male vocals set in and don't sound anything like the beautiful female vocals of the American symph proggers.

In fact, most you'll hear on this latest by Direction is pretty main stream neo prog with several excellent instrumental passages. But what strikes me with those is that they are stronger compositionally than where the execution is concerned. And then I will have to be more specific because in my believe there is not much wrong at all with the keyboards but it's the guitar that is not really impressive to me. Also the vocals are almost a matter of taste and could be a love or hate thing to listeners.

First five songs have an average length of hardly over 5 minutes and that might give the impression they don't have much to offer but the songs are compact and all contain very good instrumental contributions. The fourth of this quintet, Touriste Urbain is clearly the weakest of these five and almost sounds like a pop song. The rest is somewhere between 3,25 and 3,5* in quality so pretty good that is. Two mini-epics at the end (Soldat and Dernier Issue) have even more to offer and are both compostions with very strong moments.

It makes the choice for the ultimate rating pretty hard, this is one of those obvious 3,5 star albums that almost give you a headache for the definitive fixation. I will have to make a choice and since the majority of songs don't reach the average I will have to round down to three. A very good album though and recommended to neo prog fans who don't mind French vocals.