THE WHIRLWIND

Transatlantic

Symphonic Prog

4.07 | 1035 ratings

From Progarchives.com, the ultimate progressive rock music website

Now I'm not a huge neo-prog fan, nor am I an expert on the genre. I've heard a few neo-prog recordings and can tell you that this is one of the very best I've heard.

It's a long one and I had to ready myself to sit through it from beginning to end but thorougly enjoyed it. The music is symphonic prog and the lyrics are good in that they sit well with the out-of-this-world sound that symphonic prog has. There is also a lot of good, more rocking parts. I like the vocals, they're quite good.

The bass line is pretty mean and the rhythm guitar is quite aggressive but beautiful, airy synths preside over it and the songs sometimes have good choruses, I think 'Coming out of the night' was a catchy song and plenty of the other songs were catchy but also had very good instrumental playing. This is the 'neo-prog supergroup', if you like, so they really SHOULD be good.

That said I think after this I put on 'A trick of the tail' by Genesis and I thought that the instrumental section were a lot more 'inspired' than the instrumental sections on 'The Whirlwind'. Don't get me wrong, their 'sound' is very good, very big sound as usually comes with symphonic prog, and their song-writing is very good, but their instrumental work, while good, solid, interesting, sometimes inventive, is nowhere near as inspired as the instrumental work on early and mid Genesis albums, and this album does not do too much to add to what has already been said on the progressive rock scene, at least musically. Maybe the last two songs stretch it out a bit but I'm sure we've heard that sought of thing before. It's not really re-inventing the wheel or trying to stretch what Progressive rock can do, it is merely showing that it's the 'best of the bunch' on the current progressive scene. I downgraded from 4 to 3 because I think it is not that original, and it defienitely is not as well done as a Genesis or Yes album, so how can it be as good as a 4 star album?

Still this is very highly recommended to progressive rock music fans.

Brendan | 3/5 | 2010-4-20

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