CARVED IN STONE

"Carved in Stone" starts off with the excellent "Cliffhanger". The song demostrates quite well what these guys are capable of technically. At 8:41, its the second longest song on the album after the epic "Ghost Ship" and is easily the best one.

We segue into "Crystalline Dream" which sets the trend for future Shadow Gallery songs with a instrument-driven melody with a catchy, sing-along type chorus. Again, we segue into the strong, melodic "Don't Ever Cry, Just Remember".

After this is a rather weak sequence of songs with "Warcry" which sounds a little disorganized (a surprise for a group of the standard of SG) and the quaint "Celtic Princess" which kind of gives me the feeling the band didn't really know what they wanted to say with the song.

It gets better from there again with "Deeper Than Life" and the soft, pleading vocals of "Alaska". "Ghost Ship", the epic closer, sounds suspiciously like several songs forced together as one long piece. It still makes a formidable package, though, and the instrumental parts are reminiscent of technicality of "Cliffhanger". Which is to say, the album leads us back to where we started and leaves us waiting impatiently for what comes next...(which, incidentally, is the amazing masterpiece "Tyranny"!)