THE DIFFERENCE MACHINE

(Quick Review)

The Difference Machine is English band Big Big Train's seventh full length album, however, it's possibly the first album of theirs that receives a decent amount of attention on behalf of Progressive Rock fans. In fact, this band is hardly known of outside of this crowd. "The Difference Machine" offers a nice, few songs to sit through, songs that aren't afraid to show classic Prog influences under their sleeves, especially Peter Gabriel-era-Genesis influences. Big Big Train are naturally a very talented band, with good songwriting skills and great musicianship, but there still are some elements they have to adjust before conquering the musical scene they're trying to dominate: these flaws lie especially in the structuring of the songs, which are often very disjointed in their flow, not to mention, a bit muddy when it comes to instrumental clarity and interplay. The guitar, for example, although always well-plaid, seems often to be disrupting the music and overcrowding it. Exception be made for the one, fantastic and gorgeous track of the album, "Saltwater Falling on Uneven ground" beautifully crafted, tremendously executed, with fantastic and haunting melodies echoing throughout the twelve minutes of the song. The rest of the tracks are pleasant but much more flawed, having those glitches mentioned earlier. It's also a bit of a disappointment that in the end, out of these seven tracks, only four of them are full-length songs, while the remaining three are interludes that divide up the actual songs from one another.

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