LAID TO REST

Deftly blending Arabic folk music and passages reminiscent of anime soundtracks (it's not for nothing that the the band's first two concept albums were influenced by Ghost In the Shell), Frequency Drift's Laid to Rest finds the band offering up an intriguing mixture of influences, demonstrating that at their best they are far from your typical progressive rock band, though there's enough Pink Floyd pastiche on here to make me feel it falls a bit short of the previous album. Where they are at their best is when they adopt unexpected influences from outside the usual range you expect prog groups to draw their ideas from, expanding the vocabulary of progressive rock in the process. You could, I suppose, that any band which is truly "progressive" absolutely needs to do such a thing; if that's the case, then Frequency Drift qualify as one of the true prog bands of the present era easily, though their experiments are not always successful.