MY RIVER FLOWS

This is the first IZZ album that I have heard and I find it to be fairly good. My River Flows is a highly polished production which incorporates so many different styles of music that it can make one dizzy at times. Not only is there a steady dose of jazz and latin flavored rock, but the inclusion of female vocals really adds an additional texture to this modern progressive act.

My River Flows is the opening tune and is a hard rocker with a catchy melody and some strong playing to create a good introduction to the album.

The 12-minute Late Night Salvation follows with a wide array of sounds including a wonderful percussion solo appearing around the nine minute mark. All sorts of production tricks are noticeable during this song as well which will turn off those who disdain overproduced music. I find that I rather enjoy the multi-channel effects which swirl around at various points in the music creating a special atmosphere.

Rose Colored Lenses is a decent song but does little to excite me. It is less progressive than the rest of the album and is easily forgotten.

Deception and Crossfire are two very strong tracks with lots of wonderful sounds from the guitar and keyboards. I find the lyrics on both of these songs to be enjoyable as well as they compliment the very progressive (yet modern sounding) music nicely.

Anything I Can Dream and Abby's Song follow and are fairly short in length (both under four minutes), yet they each add a different touch to the album as Anything I Can Dream is retro-rock while Abby's Song is an acoustic ballad with its own subtle beauty.

Defeaning Silence, all 21 minutes of it, closes the album. While some believe that IZZ was too excessive with this song, I think it is a fairly good epic. I will admit that it does have some moments that appear to be aimless, but the music is performed nicely and allows each of the members to shine over the course of the song.

Overall, this is some well-done modern prog music. It's a solid 3.5 stars, but I feel compelled to round down for rating purposes.