PRESENTS OF MIND

I would like to preface this review by saying that I am an enormous RUSH fan. Permanent Waves and Moving Pictures hold special places in my heart like few albums possibly can. When I heard phrases like "the album Rush never recorded" and "If you can't get enough of the Hemispheres/ Permanent Waves / Moving Pictures period of Rush" I though I had struck gold. So I paid 15 dollars for this album with only having heard "Safe Procedures".

The music the band has written is incredible - beautiful melodies, odd time signatures galore, long solos packed full of great chops. The problem is the lyrics. I actually cringed with embarrassment spinning this disc for the first time. The guitarist/lyricist is obviously trying to write words in the same manner that Peart has pioneered, only he is not nearly as good as it. While Neil Peart has an uncanny ability to capture sophisticated ideas that have no business in a rock song or tell a compelling narrative, Chris Herin's lyrics are unbelievably awkward and juvenile by comparison, the equivalent of being lectured by a thirteen-year old in song. Even though the James Labrie sound-alike vocalist has great talents, there is nothing he can do to make me want to hear these words sung.

Clearly this band takes a huge amount of influence from RUSH's progressive roots, but does not produce a remotely comparable product. Good music, but not strong enough to redeem the atrocious psuedo-intellectual lyrics, lyrics poor enough to give Dream Theater's last album a run for it's money. The music is however, enough to boost my rating to a 2, but not enough to make this anything I would ever want to listen to again.

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