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Threshold - March of Progress CD (album) cover

MARCH OF PROGRESS

Threshold

 

Progressive Metal

4.04 | 474 ratings

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Nightfly
Special Collaborator
Honorary Collaborator
5 stars It's been a long wait but here at last is Threshold's follow up to 2007's Dead Reckoning. Since then vocalist Mac left the band and sadly died. March Of Progress sees the return of former vocalist Damian Wilson who sang on their debut Wounded Land and third album Extinct Instinct. It proves to be an inspired choice as Wilson is singing better than ever and appears to have injected the band with a stronger sense of melody. While there's no bad Threshold album I've made the opinion in previous reviews that the band's last few albums have sacrificed melody at the expense of heaviness.

March of Progress sees the band injecting a lot of the qualities that made their best albums so great and may be seen by some as a backwards step. This however is not the case as they've somehow managed to retain the more contemporary heavier riffing of recent releases (not that their earlier stuff was exactly light) yet inject it with some fantastic melodies and plenty of light and shade moments too. These are the qualities that made their best album Hypothetical so good and March Of Progress equals that excellent album and dare I say it, perhaps even bettered it. When I started this review I had a four star rating in mind, but on this, my fifth play, everything seems to have really clicked and I find myself thinking there's not a single bad track as one killer song follows another.

This really is stunning stuff, it's clearly a recognisable Threshold album as the band power through many twists and turns in their own inimitable style yet they've really pulled out all the stops and excelled themselves. Inundated with such quality it would seem pointless to pick out best tracks but if pushed I'll go for the slightly longer ones where they can stretch out a bit more with some great instrumental sections. Closer (unless you have the ltd edition) Rubicon has some wonderful keyboard work from Richard West with a section featuring a powerful church organ type sound that gets those goose bumps up. In fact the entire band plays a blinder and Karl Groom turns in some of the best riffs of his career.

So there you have it and I can't believe I'm doing this but I'm giving March Of Progress my second five star review in a row (the last being Anglagard's latest masterpiece). How they're going to top this I don't know but if you enjoy highly melodic prog metal you owe it to yourself to check this out.

Nightfly | 5/5 |

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