TEST FOR ECHO

This album has already been thoroughly eviscerated by other reviewers, so I'll be succinct here. This is a strong example of a band writing on autopilot, recycling songwriting tricks prevalent throughout their previous efforts with the assumption a winning formula will do the work for them. The end result is a hodge-podge of uninspiring tracks that offer little emotion or indication of the group's actual level of talent. Barring a few interesting tracks, such as the title track, Driven, Time and Motion, the rest are very forgettable and emotionally flat. There are a few redeeming moments within certain tracks, such as select passages of the instrumental Limbo and Alex's solo on Carve Away the Stone (the tone he employs is quite interesting, actually), but any I haven't mentioned thus far are all tracks I regard as 2-star affairs or even lower. This is a rare for me, as I usually can at least find some redeeming qualities that my subjective preferences don't identify. But in the case of this album, tracks like Totem, Dog Years, and Virtuality are too unappealing for me to even pretend to like for the sake of rationalizing a potential silver lining. They're just plain bad to me, and I can't write a dishonest review, even for a band that has strong sentimental significance for me as my gateway into the prog community and a source of early inspiration for me as a budding musician.

In short, this is one of their weakest efforts, and I do not recommend it to anyone who is not already a dedicated fan. I've heard too many albums by this group and others that have moved and inspired me to the point that I cannot and will not give this anything higher than 2 stars. Even the best tracks on the album are far cries from 5 star songs, every single one of them. The fact that the weakest tracks are grouped so close together does absolutely nothing to redeem the album as a whole either. Not an album for completionists only, as a few songs are still good, but this is an undeniably weak release that I rarely play any more for good reason. I simply have many better albums that I would rather hear instead and do not feel I'm missing anything by not returning to this one in the slightest.