Come on gabriel, you have 800 new albums, we waiting few reviews pmpl...

Hehe i've got one here ready, actually i've got 3 here ready Hehe. I've reviewed A.C.T. Area, Amon Duul II and . .er. .next is Chicago 3 and Egg , The Polite Force- but, first , Explorers Club, Raising The Mammoth. . I HAVE TO talk about this one next . , you'll perhaps be suprised. I'll try and squeeze it in later today.

recital of the script..

Schism by Tool...well we all know how amazing it is so ill leave it there...@aaron pity u got LTE1,the second album is way beta...but look forward to ur opinions anyhow

The dvd?@ buzzzed. .

Oh i didn't put enough Z's in :) well @ dean i've listened to LTE1 but casually rather than enough to properly comment, but i will do soon. Ok well. . Time to review. .

EXPLORERS CLUB, RAISING THE MAMMOTH 2002. Well i sat down to listen to this with a certain expectation, a collaborative project featuring some stellar talents in the American prog rock scene, and in Kerry Livgren and Steve Walsh from Kansas, two legends of American rock in the past 30 years. Billed as a prog epic with 2 proper tracks spanning an hour, and considering the quality of the cast, this promised great things.

Starting with a bluster of prog metal , this album comes out kicking, but soon descends into ponderous soft rock once the verse opens up, it's uninspired, unimaginative and cliched, over the top vocals straight out of cheesy 80's hair metal and a melody that stinks.

The second of the opening tracks 3 parts (38 minutes total) is worse. A little atmospheric with shared vocal parts that feel a little like ayreon, this 11 minute section is ruined by some awful vocal effects that grate upon my ears, especially during harmonies, it's overly earnest, and it's 'soul' extended ending is so terrible i could barely listen. For prog rock, it's simple and boring, frankly, but not just that, it's cheesy beyond description.

Part 3, again at 11 minutes, is another slow dramatic piece, again with a prog metal epic in mind , but whilst the melody is pleasing this time, a blaring keyboard section spoils the flow, for what it was anyway. Really i can't believe anybody thought it was a good idea to have a keyboard part like a car alarm tunelessly offending the listeners ears. .

But there are some good individual performances, to give credit as well as criticise. Bozio's drumming in part 1 is immense, like thunder. And it ends with a flourish of prog metal with some good ideas. I enjoy the (sadly) small Labrie vocal parts, his voice when singing soft parts carries the emotion of the lyrics. Part three has some nice acoustic guitar and ends with driving jazz styled prog metal parts, but the whole 38 minutes only has the very start and end sections which are anything to

. . get excited about. Moreover, it's aimless, badly composed and mostly awful, played by some very gifted musicians who shine individually, but you cant turn s*** into gold no matter how good you are at polishing it. .

The second track is better. An instrumental which feels like they concentrated twice as much effort on. Here we see the first example of some classic prog, during quite an orchestrated section (with keyboard sounds) which turns into a metal version of Spock's Beards symphonic prog . A queen style pomp metal section is enjoyable, but whilst it builds up some good heavy rock to end, it falls flat and ends with a whimper. Still, it's a perfectly listenable prog metal piece, still not organised in

The second track is better. An instrumental which feels like they concentrated twice as much effort on. Here we see the first example of some classic prog, during quite an orchestrated section (with keyboard sounds) which turns into a metal version of Spock's Beards symphonic prog . A queen style pomp metal section is enjoyable, but whilst it builds up some good heavy rock to end, it falls flat and ends with a whimper. Still, it's a perfectly listenable prog metal piece, still not organised in

. .not organised into a real structured composition though, more of a series of different styled parts with no begining, end or narrative thread. Great musicians can do this stuff in their sleep, and it sounds reasonably good to listen to, until you realise that it's not an actual composition that is. .

A perfect example of the sloppy nature throughout this album is the track listings. The 2 tracks are broken up into 44 parts. . . .44! Why. . .that makes it just over a minute per track, who is going to try locating any specific track in that case? And worse, track 2 proper is listed as tracks 28 to 44 ,inclusive. And, cleverly, the length is listed as 28.44. . Ah. . A witty prog nugget? No, because the track is nowhere near that length, it's 21 minutes long. So even the cd booklet is amateuris

. . amateurish. I have never come across such a thing. To it's credit, it's well played with some moments that work on the opening track and the second is entirely listenable with parts that rock quite well. But. . . Don't buy this, my review is far more polite than some i've seen, parts of this are shockingly bad. What a shame.

Yeah the dvd @ gabriel it arived earlier along wiv thieving magpie. Yay! I lyk the sound of spocks beard wat albums or album would u recomend as a beginer?