Album Review - Seventh Wonder - Tiara

Sometimes a musician's main gig is the one that pays the bills, but there's another one on the side that is the real attraction. It doesn't happen often, but Seventh Wonder is one of those cases. There's a good chance you know Tommy Karevik as the lead singer of Kamelot, but despite their success, he is a going through the motions and filling a role in that band. When it comes to Seventh Wonder, he gets to fully be himself. We haven't heard from the band in eight years, so we may have forgotten just how good they are at playing progressive metal. Their last two albums, "Mercy Falls" and "The Great Escape" were wildly different record that were both jam packed with intricate playing and ear-worm melodies. I'm hard pressed to think of a better fusion of prog and pop than "Alley Cat". So while Kamelot has been busy, this is what I've been waiting for.

After that much of a wait, the album tries my patience at the start. We get a minute and a half of orchestral swell that doesn't need to be there, and then "The Everones" opens the album proper with one of the least melodic songs the band has written in a long time. Especially egregious is the section where Tommy's altered voice flatly talks through a series of ones and zeroes. It is a prime candidate for some judicious editing.

After that, we get back into traditional Seventh Wonder territory, where the riffs dance over the fretboard in a way that sounds simple yet difficult at the same time, and Tommy delivers passionately melodic vocals. "Dream Machines" is exactly the kind of song you would expect to get, while "Against The Grain" ebbs and flows, with the tempo slowing to make the chorus sound even more dramatic. Couple that with first single "Victorious", and the seeds are planted for the album to blossom into something truly great.

And to keep us from forgetting they are a progressive band, in both name and practice, we get the "Farewell" suite, which is three tracks that span nearly twenty minutes. It serves as the fulcrum around which the story revolves, and "Beyond Today", with its sparse arrangement, is where we also most easily hear the cheesiness that often pops up in Tommy's lyrics. The same thing happened on "Mercy Falls", where the story overtakes the moment, and the words turn from poetry to prose.

"Tiara" comes across as a very safe Seventh Wonder album. It isn't as immediate as either of the last two records, and it also doesn't commit itself to the narrative of the concept the same way "Mercy Falls" did. This record tries to shoot the gap between those two albums, which makes it difficult to assess. They are great at what they do, and this record has plenty of very good material all throughout, but it doesn't have the same spark of excitement their previous work did, because this is in some ways what we've already heard before, which doesn't mesh with the progressive ethos.

I might have been expecting something a little bit different after eight years, but that doesn't stop "Tiara" from being top-notch progressive metal. There isn't another band out there that plays the genre with this much melody, and that alone makes them a vital voice on the scene. There is a similarity between Seventh Wonder and Kamelot in that their records this year feel like they are treading water, but one is clearly better than the other. Seventh Wonder is an interesting and important voice, and even if they are just reintroducing themselves after a bit of a break, hearing them again is very much welcome.