AYREON

Universal Migrator part one and two as one package is really the way to enjoy this concept project, that features incredible vocal performances from all involved. It begins like many Ayreon albums with a robotic instructional voice and a lengthy instrumental. The first CD is actually part 1 which sold separately on initial release. It has quite a melancholy soundscape, soaked with synthesizers and some haunting guitar passages. There is no real metal surprisingly enough but it creates an ambience that flows from track to track. Neal Morse is a special guest and one of the highlights. The tracks are not as consistently good as part 2 and there's little to no metal and as a prog metal band they don't commit themselves here or satisfy the average metal fan; some may be disappointed at the lack of heaviness as I was. It is still compelling music but I am so used to the heavier Ayreon.

Part 2 of this saga is very heavy in comparison to this and as a result more satisfying, featuring blistering compositions such as the magnifique 'Into the Black Hole', Bruce Dickinson's contribution. 'Chaos' is also a strong track that is among the best Ayreon has produced. 'Dawn of a Million Souls' features Symphony X singer and is absolutely brilliant. There are some very riff heavy tracks and these are balanced by quieter moments. The booklet for both CDs is colourful and features iconic imagery. The sprawling concept is bookended on both CDs with the computer program effects. Overall I recommend getting hold of the double CD version that features parts 1 and 2 as it adds incredible depth to the concept. Part 2 is definitely the best in terms of a metal sound and great melodies throughout but they are both part of the whole and one cannot really exist without the other. The album is not as good as 'The Human Equation' but it certainly is one of the best Ayreon CDs. 4 stars.

A bit too heavy, too theatric, and too discordant in terms of album flow. To have such divergent dynamics--often within a single song--is, to my ears and mind, too much to handle, not enjoyable. Getting the number of widely diverse artists to participate on this project is truly an admirable achievement, I'm just not sure it was all necessary--or that it all contributes to the flow and cohesiveness of the whole. Really, it's an album of 20 totally disconnected songs each trying hard--too hard--to showcase some pretty talented guest musicians yet, in the end, only pretending to have some kind of integrating concept.

A great Broadway production. Here, it's over the top.

The higher the number of famous people you put on an album the better it is, right? No, I'm afraid not!

After the Space Rock of Universal Migrator part one and the Power Metal of Universal Migrator part two, Ayreon went into Folk Metal here while at the same time returning to the Rock Opera format of Into The Electric Castle. Like Into The Electric Castle, The Human Equation too is a frustrating listen for me as there are many aspects and elements here that I like very much while there are others that I dislike. Making a double album work is very difficult indeed, and making a Rock Opera work is even more difficult. Folk Metal itself is very challenging; when it is good it can be fantastic, but when it is bad it can be horribly and awfully bad. Arjen's attempts are sometimes very successful here, but he also falls into many traps along the way. I thus have deeply mixed feelings about this album. I have given it several chances over a long period of time, but even if it did grow on me a little after some initial disappointments, I have to say that I remain unconvinced in the end.

The instrumental aspects of the sound are mostly quite brilliant on this album. I mostly love the many Folk influences and there is a very nice and well-balanced mixture of acoustic and electric instruments and of warm, organic sounds, on the one hand, and cold, electronic ones, on the other hand. Most of the time at least, the cellos and violins, and the flutes, pipes and whistles, mix quite wonderfully with the electronic keyboards and heavy guitar riffs. There are parts that sound like Jethro Tull. The production is absolutely top notch and the album title and sleeve picture are great and absorbing.

The resources for a making great album were clearly here, the problems I have with this album lies elsewhere: Arjen just doesn't know when to stop! The idea to include no less than 11 lead vocalists (including Arjen himself) each playing a role of his or her own is simply preposterous. The storytelling is perhaps less intrusive here than it was on Into The Electric Castle due to the prudent avoidance of narration, but the fact that the many vocalists have all been given roles to play emphasizes the Rock Opera nature of the project that makes it such a difficult listen for me. The many different voices give the music a fragmented feel. There are just too many vocalists and too much vocals in these songs. The music is filled with vocal dialogues which detract from the strong instrumental aspects.

As with all Ayreon albums, the main selling point is in the many famous guests. This time Dream Theater's James LaBrie provides a strong vocal, and the voice of Devin Townsend is great on Pain (one of the strongest tracks). Saviour Machine's Eric Clayton sounds very much like David Bowie. Among the instrumental guests we find Oliver Wakeman, Uriah Heep's Ken Hensley, and IQ's Martin Orford. Great people indeed, but as usual I would rather hear them in their own musical environments.

As I said above, I very much like the Folk Metal aspects of this album. But on the track Loser it goes horribly wrong! The latter was even made into an atrocious music video. This is absolutely cringe-worthy. In the end, The Human Equation is just too long for its own good and some parts could easily have been cut.

Many good features here, but in general this is overblown and overrated

Two sides of the same coin?

Flight Of The Migrator is the second out of the two Universal Migrator albums. While the first part was a Psychedelic/Space Rock experience with hardly a trace of Metal, this second part is a full on Metal album (a mix of Neo-Classical Metal, Power Metal, New Wave of British Heavy Metal, and Progressive Metal with traces of Neo-Prog). Even though the two Universal Migrator albums are musically quite different from each other they are thematically connected (and they were subsequently released together as a 2CD package). Again, though they are different musically, they do share many characteristics with each other as well as with the two albums that Arjen Lucassen released under the name of Star One. In my personal opinion, these four albums are definitely among Lucassen's better efforts and as such they are much preferred over some of his overrated and often overblown Rock Operas.

Arjen Lucassen always indulged freely in the worst clichés and stereotypes not only of the musical genres of Progressive Rock and Metal, but also of the literary genres of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The Universal Migrator albums are no exception, but it is bearable here. Like on Universal Migrator part 1, this second part too shows more restraint in terms of the number of vocalists and diverse musical styles. As I said above this mixes different Metal styles, but it wisely avoids the bombastic Rock Opera format that plagued other Ayreon albums. It does tell a story, but the vocalists are not assigned roles to play as such which I found more than a bit cheesy on Into The Electric Castle and The Human Equation. Here Arjen wisely avoids letting the storytelling take over the music. The almost complete absence of narration and sung or spoken dialogue here helps to lower the cheese-factor significantly and bring focus back to the music itself.

The material is relatively strong and very melodic, but compared to the best albums by the bands from which Arjen gathered his all-star cast of vocalists and instrumentalists - Symphony X, Shadow Gallery, Arena, Pendragon, Iron Maiden, Rhapsody (Of Fire), and more - Flight Of The Migrator (or any other Ayreon album) does not come anywhere remotely near their quality.

Recommended in addition to Dream Sequencer, but is more likely to impress Metal fans than Prog fans

Lift off!

Ayreon is the Alan Parsons Project of progressive Metal with multi-instrumentalist Arjen Lucassen playing the role of Parsons in bringing together a large number of guests to create conceptual albums. Overall, the first Universal Migrator album is a more toned down project from Ayreon which in my opinion makes it all the better. For once Arjen shows prudent restraint and does not indulge in his usual desire for excesses and over-the-top theatrics. His otherwise constant tendency to cram as many musical elements as physically possible into one and the same album is kept nicely in check on this particular rare occasion.

He also wisely avoids letting the storytelling take over the music as he did so blatantly on the previous Into The Electric Castle and elsewhere. The almost complete absence of narration here helps to lower the cheese-factor significantly and bring focus back to the spacey and atmospheric music itself. The lyrics are still full of clichés as usual, but it is much more discrete here and thus easier to ignore it this time. This album has actually more in common with the two strong Star One albums than to other Ayreon albums, not only because of the space theme but also in several of the abovementioned respects.

As usual with Arjen Lucassen's musical projects, there is an all-star cast of Rock celebrities providing vocal and instrumental services. But while I think that some other Ayreon albums included just too many people for their own good, and I often got the impression (perhaps unfairly) that the main purpose was more commercial than artistic, the present album is more moderate and more balanced with the outside contributions. Clive Nolan and Damian Wilson make welcome reappearances and Neal Morse provides a vocal.

I can perhaps understand why some Metal fans would be disappointed with this album as there is hardly anything heavy or hard edged to be found here at all. But Prog fans, on the other hand, should find this more enjoyable than other Ayreon projects. There are spacey as well as folky elements which creates a very nice mix of electronic and acoustic instruments. Overall, this album is much more coherent and less erratic compared to the bloated Into The Electric Castle.

Possibly Ayreon's best. Recommeded!

Even the finest of ingredients can make a poor pie

Take some excellent vocals from Marillion's Fish, some almost equally strong vocals from Threshold's wonderful Damian Wilson, some keyboard solos from the great Clive Nolan of Arena and Pendragon fame and some by Kayak's Tom Scherpenzeel (who used to be a member of Camel in the 80's), a few flute solos by Focus' Thijs van Leer, and a whole lot more. Mix it all coarsely and shape it into the form of an average Fantasy story. Then you cover it all with a thick layer of cheese and the result is a half-baked, overblown Rock Opera called Into The Electric Castle.

There are indeed some fantastic moments to be found here, but Arjen Lucassen clearly bit off more than he could possibly chew trying to do everything at once. The overall result is an incoherent mess with some touches of brilliance popping up now and then. As such, it is a very frustrating listen as it occasionally shows great promise but only ends up reminding of how good it could have been but isn't.

The narration on the first track sets the scene and introduces us to the over-the-top fantasy story that in my view detracts much more from the music than what it adds. Not a good start, but the second track Isis And Osiris is actually quite fantastic. Arjen encouraged Fish to sing in his strongest Scottish accent to great effect here. I would even say that Fish's best ever vocal performances are on this album! Had the whole album sounded like this, it could perhaps have been a real success. Unfortunately, the piece of Psychedelic Pop that follows on Amazing Flight, though not bad in itself, mixes like oil and water with what came before.

Had the recurrent narration been removed thus lifting focus away from the cheesy storyline, and the large number of lead vocalists and diverse musical styles been reduced somewhat, this could have been a great album. But as it stands it is a total mess. Mixing diverse musical elements is, of course, not wrong in itself. Indeed, it is part of the very essence of progressive music. But it can easily go very wrong if it is not done properly.

The main selling point of this album, like most other Ayreon albums is the presence of all of these more or less famous people from classic and modern Prog and Metal bands. Fans of one or several of these people will at least find this album an interesting listen, but personally I must say that I would much rather listen to these bands and artists in their natural habitats.

As I mentioned in my review of the other half of this divided double album, this one is the more metal side of the Universal Migrator concept - but, as with the first one, I feel that overall the experience would be improved had Arjen Lucassen trimmed down the songs to the absolute best ones so that he could put out a single really great album with proggy and metal moments in balance. You may slightly prefer this one if you prefer the metal side of Ayreon, but for my part I think it suffers just as much from filler as its other half.

With the Universal Migrator albums, Arjen Lucassen made a classic mistake - having produced enough songs to fill a double album, he decided to actually make a double album as opposed to trimming the fat out to produce a really top-notch single album. In this case, I can kind of see why he did it - Ayreon has already catered to both a prog audience and a metal audience, so it must have made some sort of sense to make one album (this one) err towards prog and the other tend towards metal, but on the whole I think he'd have been better off putting out one carefully pared-down album to cater to both audiences.

In this album's case, the space rock-tinged, almost Floydian side of the band is paramount, and whilst there's good songs - the doomy My House On Mars is particularly good - there's also a little too much filler for the album's good.

Ayreon's third album pulls out all the stop - gathering a small army of guest vocalists, Arjen Lucassen goes for broke, offering up a two-CD rock opera with a plot straight out of cheesy fantasy B-movies: a party of mismatched adventurers from across time and space have been assembled to go on a quest into the Electric Castle because... well, don't lean too hard on the plot otherwise it'll fall over.

Unfortunately, Lucassen just doesn't pull the project off. Firstly, there just isn't 100 minutes of top-notch music here: there's too much filler and too many musical ideas are bent out of shape in order to accommodate the storyline. His ambitions also seem to have run away with him when it comes to the wide range of vocalists invited to take part in the project - sure, there's some talented people here, but there's too many of them for the purposes of the narrative, with the result that some of the vocalists don't get many more than a few lines and the characters in the adventuring party are little more than cannon fodder to be killed off or written out of the story bit by bit. (You have a talent like Fish onboard and you kill him off partway through? What are you thinking?)

To be honest, I really don't get why this album got the attention it did. It gets points for excess, I suppose, but a narrative concept album built on excess but without strong music or a good story to back it out is just empty bluster.

Ayreon's second album shows some improvement over The Final Experiment. Avoiding the rock opera format this time around means that Lucassen doesn't have to hammer his musical ideas into that constricting format and doesn't feel the need to add any filler to provide narration or context for the story. That said, it still doesn't scratch the itch for me, with songs that outstay their welcome and make me lost interest partway through and constant flirtations with developing the piece into a concept album (about the concept of fantasy) which are never quite followed through on. Like The Final Experiment, it's more of a blueprint for later Ayreon works.