ONES & ZEROS - VOLUME 0

Well, this is such an unnecessary release- anything that's at best mediocre has already been done to death by the majority of prog groups out there. I initially checked out the album as I saw it was in the top 25 crossover prog records, and remembering that I wasn't repelled by 3rdegree on my previously listen of Ones and Zeros volume 1 (they still didn't leave a strong impression) I thought I'd give them another chance. However, like many of these slightly esoteric new releases, the ProgArchives rating algorithm permits this to be above ALL Kate Bush, Talk Talk, Radiohead, Pavlov's Dog, Procol Harum etc within this subgenre alone. I've been away from the ProgArchives community for some time especially regarding reviews, but this really needs some correcting. Harmonically, lyrically and timbrally completely unstimulating, without any remotely notable technicality, production or compositional skills to hold it up. Merely another revivalist album but one that sounds like a dull, bastardised combination of B-sides from the Big Six maybe. Perhaps acceptable if this emerged in the neo-prog scene around the time of Marillion but for 2018?!

Very low 2/5 rating. 'Best' moments probably the overture, and some sections in 'Click Away' although it's unnecessarily lengthy, worst moments in 'Olympia' and 'perfect babies', mainly since they're probably the weakest lyrically (Olympia does have a nice twist on a backdoor cadence that repeats but doesn't exploit it effectively at all). Never again.