Album Review: Sky Empire - The Shifting Tectonic Plates Of Power: Part One

There are many things about progressive music I don't quite understand, and chief among them is the way they treat their vocalists. I get the prog isn't always interested in melodies and hooks, so the singers often get relegated to singing whatever they can shoehorn into the space between all of the complicated notes. It's not the best way to write songs, but we know what we're getting into before we hit 'play', so I'm not going to complain too much about that. Not yet, at least.

Where I get annoyed is when a band will sideline one of their members for huge stretches of time, as if they don't exist. In the case of this album, the press release makes a big deal of the fact Jeff Scott Soto has taken over as the vocalist... and then the record starts with a fifteen minute instrumental. Look, there are a lot of things I can say about how terrible the decision to open a record that way is, but the one that bothers me the most is that one of the members of the band is completely absent from the first song, and it's FIFTEEN MINUTES LONG. Try telling the guitar player he's going to be MIA for a quarter of the album and see how that goes over.

When Soto does finally get to prove he was there as the album was recorded, things don't get much better. "On The Shores Of Hallowed Haven" doesn't have much of a melodic hook to it at all, but the verse is written in what sounds like the wrong key for him, as his voice strains to keep up with the notes. He sounds worse than I've ever heard in those moments, and makes me wonder why the melody wasn't simply lowered to fit where his voice is strongest. He still sounds amazing when recording with W.E.T., so I know it isn't that his voice is shot. This is simply mismatching the song and singer, and it's unbelievable people so deeply rooted in the nerdiness of music wouldn't notice.

As the record moves along, there is plenty of intricate playing, and I would probably be amazed by some of it if I could dissect music theory as I was listening. Fortunately, I can't do that, so I'm able to hear music for whether it's memorable or not, and whether it makes me feel anything. This music doesn't, in any way, shape, or form. As fingers dance across fret-boards, they rarely stumble upon a series of notes that sticks out from the flurry. This is prog of the highest order, which means it has very little memorable songwriting in comparison to the sheer volume of notes being played.

There is no mention of whether this is a concept album or not, which I assumed it is, since the "Part One" note insinuates there is going to be another volume of this story. Honestly, after listening to the album, I couldn't tell you what the story is at all, other than the fact is involves god and demons. I thought I heard a song about Icarus, but I could have been filling in blanks that hadn't been fully explained. The thought of another record carrying on from here is not exactly exciting.

So what we have here is a record I'm not sure succeeds at anything. The songs aren't memorable, they aren't entirely pleasing to listen to from a production standpoint, and whatever the message is supposed to be gets lost along the way. Prog can be insufferable at times, and this is a particularly annoying instance. If this really is a concept album, spending over twenty minutes on instrumentals only goes to show these guys don't know what makes an album conceptual. If it isn't, I would say they should have spent more time refining this rather than promising a second album will be coming along.

We don't appreciate editing until we're presented with what happens when there isn't any.