THE WHIRLWIND

A lot of fuss about this latest album by the prog band of all prog bands albeit that Transatlantic is still no more than a project and not a real band. I always considered TA a potential jewel because after all there are three genius songwriters in the line-up, well at least two (Stolt and Morse) because Portnoy is not often writing true masterpieces all by himself, if he does it's most of the time along with Petrucci.

Anyway, potentially a fantastic line-up and I have to say if I look at their two previous albums I don't think they totally proved that there. SMPTe just had one masterpiece track (All of the Above) and Bridge across Forever initially overwhelmed me in a way but hardly stood the test of time for me. Though the compositional quality was pretty high mainly of the two epics, nowadays I hardly play the album anymore simply because I'm through with it, the book is closed. And that's a fairly timid harvest of this super project isn't it ? Couldn't they really have done more with their talents ?

With Whirlwind they ultimately proved they could ! Finally the super masterpiece we've all been hoping for. Sure, it's always possible to be blasé about this magnum opus and say you've heard it all before, it's retro prog, unoriginal etc etc. That's the negative way to approach the thing. But as I always say, if that's the way to do it contemporary bands might just as well cease their activities and we can all sit down and gush about what prog was in the seventies. But there's also another approach possible and that's simply listen to what is being achieved nowadays and admire the talent of nowadays. And that's what I chose to do here. With my second paragraph I think I proved I'm pretty critical about this project band and don't just adore automatically everything they do. But here they finally live up to what they have in store. And then I'm not just talking about quantity, a 77 minute epic is bound to impress, especially if you're an epic lover like me but the quality is much more important of course. And believe me if this quality would have disappointed me I would have told you.

Don't forget my expectations were really high with this one and I have heard a long line up of progressive masterpieces by now and comparing this with those I can only say: it fits in that line up, the only thing you have to do is be open minded about it and give it a real chance and then you can only come to this conclusion: a new masterpiece is born. 5 stars.