V - THE NEW MYTHOLOGY SUITE

If you fancy cliché concept albums, combined with metal music then I guess that the music featured on this work will be of major interest to you. If on top of this, super fast metal lines are your cup of tea, I'm sure that you will be enchanted.

I would be much more cautious about this release than most of my fellow reviewers. But I am mot frankly a fan of the metal genre. There are some fine melodic chords during ''Evolution'' but most of this album sounds pretty much alike.

There is no question of course about the skills and talent of the musicians (of which Michael Romeo is probably the best one). The most prog track from this album is the keys oriented ''Transcendence''. It lasts for almost forty.seconds.

My favourite track is the most melodic one, somewhat reminding me of ''Kansas'' to some extent. ''Communion.'' wonderfully combines some symphonic elements with metal sounds. A whole shebang of bombastic feel which works pretty well actually.

After a good and speedy ''The Bird.'', I quite dislike such attempts as ''On The Breath Of Poseidon'' with lots of orchestration to start and little savour to follow. It sounds as a soundtrack and could have been used in a new version of ''Laurence Of Arabia''. The same can be experienced with ''The Death of Balance'' (with a harder accent during the second part).

I guess that it is useless to tell you that ''Egypt'' holds some Middle-Eastern influences. The vocals are of the finest from this album but the global feel is just good (thanks to the mix of these metal lines and Oriental feel actually).

I am not sure that the genuine prog fan would be overwhelmed with the music he will discover with this recording. Some good tracks like ''Absence Of Light'' appeals to my taste because I am a quite heavy or hard-rock oriented old freak at times. But this is not the majority of the PA members I guess.

''Ayreon'' and ''Dream Theater'' fans should be thrilled. But I only moderately appreciate these bands. Having said this, this album is of course not a bad one. I rate it as a three star one, which means that you could easily add up one star if metal is one of your praised musical genre: virtuosity at times, raging beats, some attempts to sound like Purple during some short instrumental part (''A Fool's Paradise'') are quite alright.

Like the band said on stage while they were performing their set as opening act for ''Dream Theater'' during their European tour (at least at Antwerp where I witnessed this): ''you're gonna to have a great heavy metal night''. They didn't mention: ''you're gonna get a fine prog metal evening''. Did you get the message?

Three stars for this good album.