THE THIRD EYE

Exactly one year after the offering of ''A second of action'', in September 2003 comes Alfred Mueller's third personal work under the Soniq Theater name, carrying the title ''A third eye''.While Mueller is responsible for all keyboards, electronic drums, programmed instrumentation and composing, it was the first time a guest appears in one of his album, named Suzann and applying some vocal lines in the track ''Vamos a ver''.

What happens with Soniq Theater's works starts to become rather disturbing by the release of ''A third eye''.Mueller won't strike the prog community with his talent, but his arrangements sound again decent enough with modern, symphonic vibes and the keyboards being the dominant instruments in yet another album.Moreover, even if the album is heavily based on synthesizers, some Mellotron, organ and string samples are available and the music ranges from bombastic and atmospheric to more melodic and ethereal.But once again the problems appear in the horizon.The fake orchestrations, the thin keyboards and the totally synthetic sound of guitars, bass and drums are rather weak-sounding if not unbearable at specific moments.Every track in her contains part of these elements, meaning that all compositions are downgraded at some point.On the other hand there is still interesting material in ''A third eye'', the more rhythmic passages with the powerful keyboards and some of the melodies are quite ok, while Mueller appears slowly to move away from the E.L.P. influences for a more contemporary style of Electronic-spiced Neo/Symphonic Prog.

Free downloadable on the artist's personal webpage, that means free to be judged by any Prog fan around the world.According to my ears, this is decent, instrumental Neo/Symphonic Prog with evident Electronic touches, which struggles to be more than that due to the aforementioned reasons.