CORVUS STONE

When looking at the top albums of the year on The Prog Archives, I noticed "Corvus Stone" as a common choice among my fellow collaborators. As it turns out, Corvus Stone was formed through the power of the internet and it's ability to bring people together. I was intrigued and found it on Spotify.

The CD starts out wonderfully with a worldly sound building the tension through a series of effects and noodling weaving a soundscape that had me eager and ready for more. I would love to say that the rest of the album lived up to initial soundscape.

Both Pasi Koivu's keyboards and Colin Tench's guitars sound fantastic and they get a lot of time to shine on the mostly instrumental CD. This is both a good and a bad thing. While they're both phenomenal musicians, they did not start the project with a drummer or vocalist. This makes the album sound mostly like a showpiece / jam album. The majority of songs are relatively simple chord progressions with extended jams over lack luster drum programming.

One of the highlights of the album gives an exciting picture of what is to come, "Ice King" features vocalist Blake Carpenter, a late addition to the band. Mr. Carpenter's voice is a wonderful fit to the spacey atmosphere that they create, again hearkening back to the ambient soundscape that led the album off. The addition of drummer, Robert Wolff, to the band, unfortunately came too late to save the album from the doldrums of the drum machine.

Another highlight is the production, for an album that was recorded all around the world, the production sounds amazing.

I truly look forward to their next release, the addition of vocals and live drums to the majority of the band will represent a huge leap forward. In addition, additional musicians should help add some diversity to the song writing process. Honestly, this is a good debut album and shows a huge promise of things to come.