CALIBRATED COLLISION COURSE

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One can chart a variety of courses in the service of "making a point". Artists often choose a vague "route" in preference to a "path", to appeal to a moderately sophisticated audience, analogous to giving a hiker a general idea of the trajectory rather than specific routes and distances. Then there are the unfortunate cases of artists who smack their audience in the back of the head and tell them exactly where to go. In so doing they elevate themselves and degrade their potential fans. "Calibrated Collision Course" would be the poster child for this form of enfant terrible.

In a word, the sound here is chaotic in a perhaps deliberately unsettling manner. The musical disharmony matches the ceaseless diatribes about how we're all going to hell in a handbasket through society's overconsumption of resources be they comestible or of entertainment value. As if these weren't about as subtle as a hammer laying into a mosquito, add in news clips about global warming and, well, news clips, and you get the idea. It might have worked as a multimedia presentation, or as 5 minutes of filler in a green documentary, but one tuneless and tedious hour amounts to a jaw dropping overbite, if I can understate the case.

Points of comparison are thankfully hard to come by, but QUEEN with a correspondence school PHD comes to mind, as well as the Quebecois crossover group KAOS MOON, but GALADRIEL has neither the lofty fluffiness of the former nor the instinct for restraint and melody of the latter. Apart from the first couple of minutes of "Leap Of Faith", this CD forges one pigheaded and irreversible collision course with sanity.

I listened at least 5 times to this album but all I can say is that this is one of the strangest neo prog albums I ever heard, if it's neo at all what you hear here. To me this is a combination of neo prog and the Avant prog of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum. And let's be honest this is a very unlogical combination, something like Indo/Raga with Canterbury, it's that strange indeed.

Anyway, is that all there is to say about Calibrated Collision Course ? Actually yes because the strange and chaotic vocals and also music are coming back in each song and are the key feature of this release. It will have something to do with the idea behind the lyrics that mainly handle the chaotic state of our planet nowadays, at least according to Galadriel. I have to say I'm getting curious for the other releases by this band: do they sound the same or did Galadriel leave the neo path just recently ? They appeared on the scene about twenty years ago and their previous release was twelve years ago so I haven't got a clue but I will check some day.

This is for sure no standard neo prog so beware if you're interested. If you like something completely different go for this one but if you like it standard leave it. Hard to rate this album, I give two stars because I will not play this for my pleasure in the future and then I usually give two. Still it's not a complete disaster in my opinion. Check the streamsong here on PA I would suggest. It will give a pretty good idea.

Oh my. Something went really, really wrong when this album was created. Or perhaps this fine Spanish act suddenly decided for a major shift in sound, now trying to reach out to a truly avant-garde audience. It's not an album that will have a broad appeal, that is the one undeniable fact about this production.

Shifty, fragmented compositions with some passages firmly placed in neo-progressive territories and other with distinct jazz and funk tinges to them, some mainstream-oriented escapades with more of a genereic pop expression to them as well. Nothing new or innovative, but nothing truly bad either. The passages with instrumental layers residing somewhere in between harmonic and disharmonic are much more problematic though - neither fish nor fowl as far as I'm concerned. Add in a lead vocalist with a voice like Peter Gabriel seemingly trying to sing in the same manner as Jon Anderson (on a lower register obviously) and bombastic backing vocals used both way too often as well as outside of most normal perceptions of when they are appropriate, and the end result is taxing, and not in a good way.

Some folks will love this stuff, but it is a release that will appeal to a very select few. And I'm not amongst those charmed by this experiment, obviously.