WIRED FOR MADNESS

It has been a long since the latest Jordan's solo album, he was pretty busy with other projects. This time he had the help of great musicians including his longtime friend James Labrie, John Petrucci and Marco Minnemann. It all starts in a big fashion with a 20 minutes title track that shows the versatility of Jordan and various styles of music from prog, classical, metal and a lot of Jazz. The song contains many twists and moods, a variety of keyboards/piano sounds, but also some space is left to the guitar bringing some heaviness. The vocals are present sparsely. If the first part of that song is more in a jazz style territory, the second part is more on the classical side with symphonic arrangements. James Labrie closes the song with his singing after a strong Keith Emerson passage from Jordan. And then the rest of the album falls down to keep the momentum of this first epic where the progressive side is replaced by a more standard type of music and too much light mood music for my taste. But it is still impressive to hear how talented is this musician.