TYRANNY

Get this straight, I am not a fan of prog metal. I think it's overly violent and the use of graunting or swearing as never seemed to me anything useful but a weak commercial thing. Call me Ned Flanders I don't care, I think progressive rock is a more 'intelligent' kind of music and doesn't need to mold itself inside the fashion of the world. This been said, get that: this is not really metal nor progressive nor commercial but entirely tasty!

Is Shadow Gallery really metal? I think it's basically good muscle rock, not heavier than Steve Vai or Joe Satriani. Tyranny gives you a lot of good solos a la Satriani, perpetuous double bass drum, arpegos of keyboards and hard rock vocals. And over that, the story is actually going somewhere. Oh goodie! Something else than knights and dragons, get this : world pandemia. Like the Spanish Flu in the 1920's, Tyranny is talking about small pox that could vaporize the entire nation. Talk about actuality considering the bird flu factor, growing slowly but surely.

Musically, Tyranny is nothing short of intense and entertaining. Americans surely knows how to keep interest, and Shadow Gallery is keeping the pace fast and the performances full throttle. No songs seems to suffer from 'filler syndrome', but they seem to jump from another time zone. Indeed and unfortunetaly for some, Shadow Gallery seems to fuel more on the early 90's than today's production. The sound and compostions' textures could tend on the Images and Words side. Too bad, because if this would be remixed with an 'Octovarium attitude', we'd get one nasty son of gun. The fact that Shadow Gallery's main (and I mean it) influence is Dream Theater is okay, since they are both extremely talented musicians. On the other hand, why do they keep the same old 1993 sound? The best example should remain Octovarium, previously stated. Dream Theater is a good example of a band that's going with the flow, keeping the whole sound and production fresh and updated, even sometimes ahead of it's time.

Despite the relatively old sound (vocal harmonies reminds Cinderella and Poison), this is a very, very enjoyable concept experience. Tyranny and Room V should be a part of anyone who dares to listen to prog metal, not only because of their cool stories, but also because of the choruses that drills right into your cortex and makes you want to sing out loud. Like I said, I'm not the one rooting for prog metal, but this one is varied enough to create it's own little universe. To make it more imaged, if Tyranny would be a movie, it would be Michael Bay's Armaggedon. In think you got the picture.

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