EL CIELO

dredg over the course of their career so far have had two masterpieces, this album and "The Pariah, the Parrot, The Delusion". The other albums have been sort of all over the place, good albums but not quite up to par to these two albums.

This album is a concept album based on a painting by Dali called "Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bumblebee around a Pomegranate One Second Before Awakening" which according to the band symbolizes sleep paralysis which reportedly Dali's wife was plagued with. There are several letters written by dredg fans about sleep paralysis and each song on this album (except for the "Brushstrokes" instrumentals) contains some words from these letters in the lyrics.

The music is guitar-based prog but with a good mixture of keyboards added in which provides a good texture to the music and helps with the variety that is inherent throughout the album. The main songs and the transition pieces in between work very well together and help the songs flow into each other nicely, which is how a well-planned concept album works best. The transition pieces add to the album instead of provide filler, so every part of this album is important. The songs are full of dynamic changes and a lot of styles are used which keep the music interesting. I love variety and there is a lot of it on this album, but the album is still concise and everything fits together well.

One problem with a lot of modern music (especially popular music) is that you can listen to an album and every song follows the same style or pattern so nothing usually stands out. This is a problem bands like U2 has ran into on their recent albums. They get rutted into a certain sound and pretty soon everything sounds the same...every new song is just another song. dredg gives a perfect example of how an album should sound, but they are not concentrating on generating a couple of hits and then adding filler to have enough material for an album. The reason why so many other bands suffer from this is because of digital downloading and the move away from album-oriented music. Hopefully, however, with the resurgence of vinyl, people will return to album- oriented music. With dredg on this album, however, most of the songs here can be listened to on their own just fine, but it works even better as a whole and with that they have accomplished something pretty amazing. That, along with some well written music that utilizes progressive elements very well, gives this music the perfect balance. Plus there is enough of a challenge to this music to make it interesting and intriguing.

So, I do consider this a masterpiece of modern prog music, even though it is not heavily immersed in prog, it deep enough to be quality art rock and is very enjoyable, beautiful at times and exciting in others. I love this album and can't see giving it anything less than 5 stars, even on a progressive rock scale.