BEACONS

Lately the funds have been low for purchasing new music. So I've been searching for stuff from the past 2 years or so that I can listen to for free...legally. This is a recent album that gets lots of good reviews. I don't share the enthusiasm. There is nothing wrong or bad about the music here. I admire Ben Sharp's one-man-band approach. He knows how to play his instruments. He uses the Radiohead model of "pay what you want". The biggest problem I have with this album is...it's not really prog.

I don't listen to a lot of modern metal, but I have friends who do. Most of the metal they listen to is in the non-prog variety. A lot of it sounds similar to this but has screaming and growling. This is instrumental metal. Good instrumental metal. But not very proggy. One of the biggest problems I have with most metal music that gets labelled 'prog' is that the metal aspects far outweigh the prog ones. I honestly don't hear anything here that wasn't already being done in 2000. If you like modern instrumental metal, then you will probably like this. If your looking for something proggy you will be disappointed.

I like the song titles here; sounds like a few sentences broken up. "I Admit It Now. I Was Scared" is the one song that caught my attention the most. Some nice volume pedal swells here. I don't know how much volume pedals are used in modern metal, but it sounds good here. In the 1970s everyone from Yes to Aerosmith were doing the volume pedal swells thing. Usually at the beginning of a song. "It's Bad. We're Hit, Man, We Are Hit" is the only other song that did anything for me. Especially the middle part.

I wish Mr. Sharp the best. This is a decent metal album, but not much more. In general I am not into most metal with the 'prog' tag. Listening to this just reminded me I got to do that Unexpect review I've been meaning to do. 2 stars.