UNSPOKEN WORDS

A great album with wonderful music, with one major flaw. "Unspoken Words" is a concept album, based on an essay written by guitarist Marc Vooys. The main idea behind the "Unspoken Words" concept comes from a theory found within quantum psychology, which handles around trance-state experiments. Short explanation: all emotional cognition is formed within a state of subconscious trance. The recall of such memory is done by reversing the process and music is an excellent catalyst. The storyline found within "Unspoken Words" is imaging the progression of different mental states, events chronologically following a timeline from first confrontation with new information that upsets the existing mental state to the final resurrection of the ego (=acceptation/incorporation of the new reality). The first songs of the album describe the reaction to the confrontation ("Betrayal" ,"Unspoken Words", "Event Horizon") and the last part visualizes the resulting mental state ("Gathering", "Nocturnal Lament", "Resurrection")

From the start of "Unspoken Words I", you instantly get the feeling of being pulled inside the story. The musical styles vary according to the mental process described. "The Betrayal" is angry prog metal. "The Untold Prophecy" is more melodic, almost fully dropping prog metal idiom, almost a balad. The Gathering, on the other hand, has some pretty heavy bits. The album culminates in the final song (which is like a mini-epic) "The Resurrection", a breath-taking mixture of prog metal and softer passages, which ends in a bombastic eargasm with a full choir, which imho could have lasted at least ten minutes longer... Dennis' fine voice takes you through a melodically sober, but inspired musical journey, played by a band dedicated to their music. The guitars are varied, the keyboards sound heavenly, the drums are rock-steady and Rob's bass-playing is exemplary.

So, what is the flaw of this album? Well, between the songs you'll find the short SD [...] tracks, and one long (almost 6 minutes)"System Log" track, which are spoken by a narrator. In my opinion these have no place in the album, but should have been put in the booklet as text. Now they influence the flow of the album in a very negative way.

Conclusion: The music of this CD is very, very good and sometimes even better than that, and merits fully five stars. However, due to the disturbing narrator parts I'll only give 4. But still highly recommended!!