IN A WORLD

This band has some really great instrumental moments. In fact I thought I was listening to a masterpiece work when In A World began. Then the vocals started and I was a bit disappointed, but overall I thought the song was good, The album continued to lead me on with Merkaba being the true stand out track (sounded very much like Kansas' Magnum Opus w/o being a copycat.) However, with the AOR style ballad, the album began to quickly slide downhill. There were few more good instrumental moments, overshadowed by the dreadfully formulaic vocals and styles, that sound like they were ripped directly from Journey or something. The exception is I am the Energy which is not an overly inventive, but still a fairly decent prog metal number. Overall, my hopes for this album were dashed to the ground by the end of track six. I wanna give it 2.5 stars but seeing as I am new to the review process, I shall give this work the benefit of the doubt with three stars. I think Cryptic Vision definitely has the right stuff to become a very good band, it just seems they need a little more creativity; they only had about half an album's worth of strong material here.