A MURDER OF CROWS

I must say that I really enjoyed this album. I don't own a lot of albums of this type from this corner of the prog world, so I didn't know what to expect when I bought it. Wow, was I pleasantly surprised!

Virtually everyone of these songs has a nice tight, grinding rhythm base that really drives these songs home. The bass is prominent, without being over bearing, and the drumming contains some nice fills and change of timings that lend itself well to the songs. Since most of the guitar work is rhythm based and on the low end of things, you are presented with a solid wall of low end register that really rattles the woofers.

Devon Graves on vocals, does a nice job of going back and forth through the vocal scales switching between soft, high end pleadings with straight ahead vocals that seem appropriate for that particular moment in the song. The songs generally contain interesting and legible lyrics, that at times can be thought provoking without being preachy. There's not a lot growling here.

If your looking for a comparison in style, I would say look to some of Tools earlier stuff, particularly Undertow. I'm not saying who's better or worse, just trying to give you an idea on the type of music.

If there any draw backs, it would be the very things that I praised. After 6 or 7 songs with the same type of wall of sound, it would be nice to break it up a little bit. There is also a serious lack of any type of solos, whether they be guitar, keyboard or any type of musical interlude. A few of the song sstart out with some nice flute work, but this is the exception. It doesn't have to be some 150 bar solo, encompassing the entire music scale, but it would certainly make the songs much more interesting, and prevent them from seemingly blending together after awhile. This could be because Graves plays all the instruments except for the drums. Perhaps, if he collaborated more with other musicians, there would be some nice mixing of styles.

Overall I thing this album would be a worthy addition to someones record collection, but I wouldn't rate it as a must have.