User Page: Mike

Great slow pace guitar shred slash blues album, and as is always the case with Paul Gilbert: great musical humor. Prog Fans listen up: though the album is not prog, it includes the Yes masterpiece Roundabout as a bonus cover track!

Nice - but not as great as Vai's truly classic albums of the 1990s. If you're a fan not only of Vai, but of nice guitar music in general - go for it, but it's not as bold and "out there" as his masterpieces of old.

This is my favorite Cake album - a timeless classic, as far as I'm concerned. Great music, about as dry and spartan as you can get, with great humor and a lot of class. Fuzzy dice like testicles and breasts bouncing on sofas meet Frank Sinatra ...

This album presented me with quite a challenge - it's kind of dark-ish, but not quite. I settled for a combination of playful and eerie, which makes for quite a team. Add to that the element of improvisation, the eclectic mix of styles, the exalted vocals on some of the tracks - excellent!

 So far I've listened to the album three times, and while it is admittedly nice, I think it's one of the weaker DT albums. It's still quite good, but the words "haphazard" and "forced" pop up a bit too often in my mind when I'm listening to the album, particularly in the opening track. Mike Mangini is a great musician, but on this album the drums strike me as largely unimaginative compared to Portnoy's style. Of course one could also say that Mangini simply chooses to stay in the background and let the other band members shine (which definitely plays out well in that regard, particularly with Myung and LaBrie), and indeed I think that there's great potential for a truly great next album that hopefully won' t be recorded under such unfortunate circumstances.

The bottom line: a solid album, but ultimately falling short in terms of songwriting and inspired playing (don't get me wrong, there are plenty of inspired moments, it's just lacking compared to other DT releases) and thus a transitional step for the band, pretty much like Feel Euphoria was for Spock's Beard - at least that's my wish(ful thinking).

I really enjoyed listening to this album. It's a well balanced mix of styles, mostly laid back, with a few odd breaks and time signatures thrown in, but more often than not on the lighter side of things as far experimentation is concerned, but nevertheless with solid songwriting and progressive tendencies throughout.

Nice! Two long tracks, some crazy segues, huge grooves with lush instrumentation, and Gilmour's leads blend in nicely.

This actually isn't too progressive - the tracks have somewhat conventional structure, but they also feature the occasional extreme outburst (think Meshuggah or Opeth). All in all: A nicely done album!

I like the album - I guess you could say that it's "more of the same", but nicely done anyway. Listened to it the other day after the latest Elvis Costello album and thought: This is like the sonic version of contrast showering ...

Every Led Zeppelin fan should get this release ... the sound quality is amazing.

I really don't like this album ... at all. I loved Posthumous Silence and as far as overall style, musicianship and production are concerned this is just as good, but the sub-par songwriting combined with the overly theatralic/emotional singing ruin it for me.

I really enjoyed listening to this album ... it's Avant-Garde music walking the fine line between Jazz and Rock, with much improvisation in it, very dynamic and not too easy to listen to if you're not used to it ... but it's also quite playful and not as gloomy as many other Avant-Prog albums that I've listened to lately.

Slow. Really Slow. Really, *Really* Slow. Very sparse ... the band set out a decade earlier to make Doom Metal music without guitars, and they've certainly come a long way. This isn't metal at all ... there aren't any guitars, and apart from the occasional crunchy jazz organ sound there isn't any distortion either. This is essentially very tasty, melodic Jazz music played very slowly over regular, but very minimalistic rock patterns.

Confused? Give it a spin, listen for yourself!

What a voice! No, that wouldn't do this album justice ... the voice is magnificent, but the piano is even more prominent - and she's really taking it to the extreme. At first you might think "Tori Amos", but the music is actually quite different - definitely more aggressive (at least on this album) and more focused.

A really, really good blues album. Some covers, some original compositions ... great musicianship throughout, not just in the guitar department.

Wow ... just wow *big grin*. Listen to this magnificent album, you just *have* to.

I just listened to this again after quite some time (several years) and again it blew me away. If I had to say something negative about the album is that it occasionally gets a little bit cheesy story-wise ... but I don't mind at all. The songwriting is awesome, the musicianship flawless ... as is the production. If you're a fan of complex metal ... wrap your ears around this!

I really love the QotSA style ... some people prefer Kyuss (the de facto predecessor) because of the more epic/psychedelic/improvisational style, but QotSA make up for that with magnificent songwriting and a really cool and fresh approach in terms of harmonic structure and weird instrumentation. Add to that a good dose of humor ... not so much in the sense of comedy, but as far as witty/"naughty" lyrics are concerned.

This is the solo album of Mariusz Duda, known to most as the singer of progressive metal band Riverside. The music could be described as the atmospheric, thoughtful and non-metal part of Riverside, with a heavy dose of world music thrown in.

I really enjoyed it, but IMO they should have used more clean vocals - the black metal type growls/shrieking doesn't always match the music, which is really diverse and eclectic beyond the typical atmospheric black metal.