AN ABSENCE OF EMPATHY

I'm not sure of how this album got into my order list from the library: I suspect one of my buddy (my jazz-mentor at that venerable institution) Marcel's stupid prank on the April's Fool, (he knows what little respect I hold for that fouled-mouth bumbling idiot Seb Bach), but nevertheless this album found its way into my living room and worse, into my deck and finally into my ears. Thanks, buddy!!! I'll getcha for that!!

So I got stuck with this unwanted piece of metal in my deck, and instead of popping it out and return to the library and make Marcel swallow it, I decided to use this piece of junk (mostly and solely because of that brain-dead Seb's presence on it) to get one more review ahead of my other buddy Eric. I wonder how that hairspray-puffed poof foul-mouthed idiotic "singer" managed to get into a progmetal album that should be well beyond his poor scope of comprehension. That mystery got resolved by looking at the credits; he only participated (very partially, most likely: maybe just two or three aligned words) to the lyrics of two tracks and nothing else. He just sang, which pauses another problem: how did he manage to rerad the lyrics. I think Gordon (the conceptor of the concept) and Pauly (the musical kingpin of the project) resolved that by doing an abject subject that was susceptible to interest whatever braincells still alive in Seb's dead brain. So the concept is rather idiotic, dealing with serial murders, school violence, impulse killers, torture, rape and other joyous recommendable subjects: as you can see, right up idiotic Seb Bach's alley.

As to the music itself, this kind of crap holds absolutely NOTHING prog whatsoever, even if it tries (and fails) a bit with choirs, concept and other gadgets, which become ridiculous on this kind of album. Musically the album is not bad, somewhere between the hair metal of Motley Crue, skidding towards mid-Metallica, oogling early Dream Theater and drooling to Queensryche (add the "¨" where you please ;-). It would seem to me that metal has moved on since the late 80's, but maybe that's just me. So to fool progheads, in order to get some kind of sales, the writing team decided to breakdown rapes, tortures and murders into two phases, the perpetrator/predator (the doer for Seb's comprehension) and the victim (the enjoyer for Seb's comprehension). How so very cool, clever, thoughtful and bright!!! How did I not think of that??? What is this piece of crap doing on such a site of ours?

This is exactly the type of album that the Mothers Of Prevention were having a case for, and unfortunately on favoured Frank did not see the day to see such abomination claiming the right of free speech. ***at the asking of a few members, a few sentences about to whom this album might appeal to were edited by the review's author***

An abject piece of crap.

PS: this review was written a few days before the Virginia Tech massacre and posted in the Archives without the writer's knowledge of it, so he makes no links between the album and the the event, but cannot help but thinking that such subject should certainly be dealt with much greater care than Mr Pauly did.