THE GREAT MISDIRECT

It's interesting that The Great Misdirect hasn't received a single review since November which is only a month after its release. At the same time this abnormality actually manages to explain exactly how I feel about this particular album.

After some impressive work on Colors I was interested in the direction this band would undertake on their follow-up release. It felt as though Between The Buried And Me should still have a great deal of inspiration left in them to carve out something even more spectacular this time around! Would it be a new over-the-top concept album or maybe a release consisting of one coherent track? Let's listen and find out...

The first two tracks start in a similar manner to the band's previous outputs but this time without anything spectacular. Mirrors is a sparse and underwhelming composition that doesn't fulfill its purpose as the opening track. Things do start to look up with Obfuscation and the band even manages to get some of the transition sections to actually work but every time I hear the ending sections guitar riffs and solo it all feels too much like a re-work of Dream Theater's Scenes From A Memory. This is truly a pity because the rest of material doesn't reach the intensity level that was offered by Obfuscation. Instead we are treated to the same old riffs as always which would have worked well if I didn't have all these high expectations after Colors!

The conclusion of The Great Misdirect is where it really goes sour for me! Swim To The Moon features an extensive instrumental jam section filled with every cliche in the book which could have been avoided by scaling down the composition to 10-12 minute format. As it stands today this 18 minute track has very little to offer in exchange for this hefty chunk of my time and I always feel underwhelmed after hearing it.

Overall performance-wise there isn't anything particularly wrong with this release and have I not known what this band was actually capable of then my review would probably have been different. I don't consider this album to be a bad release but at the end of the day I'll always end up choosing Colors over it. This is also why I think everyone has already forgotten about The Great Misdirect and are instead eagerly awaiting what this band will think of next!

**** star songs: Mirrors (3:38) Obfuscation (9:15) Disease, Injury, Madness (11:03) Fossil Genera - A Feed from Cloud Mountain (12:11) Desert Of Song (5:33)

*** star songs: Swim To The Moon (17:54)