BRIDGE ACROSS FOREVER

The big questions facing prog supergroup Transatlantic on the release of their second album, Bridge Across Forever, was could they continue to create such impressive music and could they do it by creating something new? The answer, in short, was yes and no.

Transatlantic's first album is one of my personal favourites and it was always going to be a hard job to beat the excellent SMPTe. Sadly the group couldn't, but they did give it a damn good go at it by doing what, it seems, they do best, big epics. Of the four songs on here, and this is a full length album at 1 hour 17minutes, two of them are over 25 minutes in length and a third song is over 12 minutes, with only the title track being short at 5 and a half minutes.

Of course when a band makes numerous epics like this, they run the risk of having large amounts of pointless noodling that ends up going nowhere and doing nothing other than boring the listener to tears. Thankfully that isn't the case here. I don't know how they do it but these guys, when working together, are able to make a full half hour song seem like 15 minutes, it goes past so quick whilst you enjoy it that its unbelievable, a trait that they have carried over from their first album. In fact this album, musically, is a match for what they have previously accomplished and overall is just as enjoyable with lots of great music.

So why no 5 stars? Well, this album does sound almost the same as its predecessor without any real progress, they haven't moved on and, though they do this very well, it can get boring quickly if they don't change the formula. The other problem is the title track itself. It's a piano only track with Neal Morse doing vocals and seems to have little to no input from the other three members. Couldn't this have been left to one of Morse's solo albums, especially since I find it rather dull and sticks out like a sore thumb here.

What you do get is two rather brilliantly composed epics (Duel With The Devil and Stranger In Your Soul) that have each member of the band firing on all cylinders. The other track (Suite Charlotte Pike) starts off sounding almost like a jam but the structure of the song becomes stronger and more apparent the longer it goes on, very nice. Lyrically it seems that most of these tracks are linked by a common theme (another reason why Bridge Across Forever sticks out on this album, I don't think its linked) with phrases like "stranger in your soul" and "duel with the devil" appearing quite often throughout. I'm not sure what their getting at but it's a nice touch all the same.

Basically the only things wrong with this album is that its completely un-original and that the title track is a very big disappointment, so I give this a well deserved 4 out of 5.