THE TYLER DURDEN PROJECT

This album is the first release by Mirage in over a decade. It is with a renewed line up featuring only Stephen Forner of the original Mirage. Fear not, this is still Mirage. Lounge fitting vocals are plentiful as are guitar solos and lengthy tracks. However, there is a strong metal sound throughout this album, distorted guitar and aggressive drumming. It isn't the heaviest of metal but still a sound I would consider metal. His is a welcome change as it brings new life to Mirage. Unfortunately, the music on The Tyler Durden Project is just not very impressive. Inspired by the novel Fight Club, this album at times comes off as a musical, replete with cheesy melodies and dialogue like lyrics. Additionally the music still meanders and keyboards play basically no role.

In short this album has a gimmick (a concept album of sorts) and new sound yet fails to improve upon any of Mirages shortcomings. (The songs go on and on, noodling, bland melodies and poor instrumentation)

This is not a master piece as Mirage never pretend to be Steven Wilson our Dream Theater..I guess they are just poor musicians trying to bring something new as amateur guys. Actualy they bring rich hamony and subtil rythm paterns....they made a real concept album..Only one track ( the last one) as a well know chords structure, all the rest is a kind of experimentation , and that is the deal for this kind of music....you can find a lot of other prog music , better produced , with better musicians but unfortunatly , most of those show a critical lack of imagination..In the release Mirage try to produce something unusual, and they succeeded sometimes, like "how can you know" or some hard blues rythm in " fair warning" ( lsiten to the intro). To me the real wrong aspect is the poor production, i am sure that if they get more competency in recording mixing and mastering the result would have been a great new piece..as you can see they album is an auto production, that mean they did it is their home studio with can't be a real professional one

Here is yet another "comeback" by a long assumed dead prog rock group. The sometimes symphonic sometimes fusion sometimes heavy French band's first release in 12 years gives the impression that they forgot to unleash several productions during the intervening years. This is because, while it bears similarities to "Borderline", to say it picks up where that album left off would be to imply that they suddenly suffered an unprovoked heart attack and conveniently omit the likelihood that it was provoked by years of failing health. I'm not saying that they had to remain a CAMEL clone band - in fact their pinnacle album "Tales from the Green Sofa" sounds like a CAMEL collection that enhances that band's legacy while barely retrenching at all. While I had issues with the direction on "Borderline", "The Tyler Durdan Project" doubles down on the clumsiest tendencies of the past, a hard rock and bluesy interpretation of the fictional protagonist of "The Fight Club" movie, book and comics. One would expect more aggressive programming but not the plod rock parody on display here, punctuated by technically skilled and utterly vapid lead guitar solos only accentuated by Stephan Forner's lackadaisical vocals, a strength of the group when their music actually soared contrastingly. Such a shame.