Album Review: North Sea Echoes - How To Cast A Shadow

I don't pretend to know the complications and considerations that go into the business of making music, but sometimes the optics make very little sense when viewed from the outside. Fates Warning was not the biggest band in progressive metal, but they had an audience, and they had a legacy. That made it rather difficult to understand how as the band wound their career down, the members have moved on to other projects that keep them busier than Fates Warning itself was. They make different shades of music, but it's all cut from similar cloth, so a progressive band would not have been out of place in attempting to traverse these new influences.

North Sea Echoes finds Jim Matheos and Ray Alder joining forces once again, exploring the melancholy strains of rock they have spent the last three decades trading in. This project has a bit more ambience, and electronic flourishes, but the heart of their partnership will always sound like themselves. As to why the situation seems so odd to me, let's address it this way; despite Fates Warning being in my sphere of knowledge, I'm not sure I knew this project's first album ever existed.

The trouble with melancholy is that there is a fine line between the beauty of sorrow and outright black depression. Plenty of bands have tried to ride that edge, only to find themselves in a bitter slog that shows no light making the trip worth taking. As the opening track on this record unfolds, the four minutes of slow ambience gives the impression we are headed toward the ugly side of the ledger. The song offers little in the way of an immediate musical foothold, traversing on a cloud of sound that struggles to explain why we are listening to it.

First single "Enjoy The View" follows, and paints a very different picture. The guitars enter the mix, which give the song more than enough energy to keep its movement intact. Ray sounds great belting out the chorus, which is able to find that balance I was referring to. This can be mistaken as nothing else but melancholy, but played with a passion that lets us think there is something waiting for us on the other side of it. It's the difference between film noir and simply not turning the lights on at all.

"Good Enough" is another slow build, but Ray's melody has a contour that makes it engaging and enjoyable, and this song builds to a true payoff, which is an essential part of letting the fuse inch forward. When the song is slow and doesn't build, it can feel like a waste of investing our feelings in it. When there is a cathartic moment for our pathos, it makes all the difference. That comes as Ray sings the chorus, "I'll leave a light on in case you come home/But I won't hold my breath". It's a beautiful melody, a lovely delivery, and a message that leaves enough of a cliffhanger to want to hear the next chapter.

The majority of the record follows suit, with enough texture and grit to the music to match the emotional heaviness Ray is singing with. These songs aren't metal, but the roots of their writing can be heard in the softer tones. If you transported Fates Warning back to a time when amps were less saturated, the result could very well sound like this record. There is also a familiarity with Opeth's "Damnation", if that record didn't muffle its sound quite as dramatically.

North Sea Echoes is indeed doing something different than Ray has achieved with his solo albums, or with A-Z. Taken together, the three projects split Fates Warning's personality as if a prism, giving us smaller ranges of the old totality. That makes them interesting distillations, and somehow more interesting than the fuller mixture. This record leaves me with questions I can't avoid asking myself, but know aren't necessarily fair; Is this better than Ray's solo albums, or A-Z? Sharing so much connective tissue, separating them is rather difficult.

What is less difficult is saying that all of these projects are more effective for me than Fates Warning ever was. Ray's solo albums both appeared in my year-end top ten list, as did A-Z's second album, and this feels like a lock to join them. I've heard very little music this year that stirred something in me, but North Sea Echoes absolutely has. It may not be the best album of the year, but it's not far off.