PICTURE

I bought this disk after I heard some promising things about it and because of the fact this "project" includes members like John Mitchell and Pete Trewavas. I'm always very curious about new projects with (some of) my favourite participants. But after I listened to it several times I found out this wasn't quite what I had hoped for.

In one of the forum topics this was compared with the Frost-project and that one came up to my expectations a lot more. One of the reasons for that is simply the contribution of John Mitchell. On the Frost album he shows his full potential (which I enjoyed optimally) but on this disk that is absent I'm afraid. Picture is a much more accessible album containing almost pop-like songs, on itself nice sounding but hardly truly progressive to me. I wonder if they did that intentionally or that it just turned out like this. Because the bandmembers are true proggers, so why ? Anyway I like (and expected) the more progressive sort of music but leaving that aside I will try to give this a fair review. The first track is immediately the highlight to me. It's the most progressive and versatile song of the album but at the same time that's actually disappointing because it's a good track but no more than that. So where leaves that the other ones ? The other songs are more or less of equal quality but in rating terms that's somewhere between 3 and 3.5 stars (Losers day parade scores just about 4 for me). All you see and Holding On are the more ballad-like tracks though the second ends up as a much more energetic composition.

All in all not bad of course but not really what I'm looking for in progressive music. Even for neo-progressive standards this is minimal in that respect, probably the reason this band is categorized as prog related. The execution and production are ok so I will give it 3 stars (3,3).