UNIVERSE

The debut album of PLANET X has a lot of strength, heaviness, groove and jazzy flavor. when I approach an instrumental progressive album, I tend to fear an avalanche of different solos, few logic melodies and a lot of shredding. This is not the case at all with the album UNIVERSE. You can hear songs worked at detail, catchy melodies, a lot of different time signature changes and a musical direction with taste, more than just exercises of pure skills.

Maybe that's way this album is not that popular between metal lovers, which is interesting when you see that the amount of heaviness in the album tend to segregate the jazz fans as well. They choose a dangerous balance of heaviness and jazz groove, well, that's just great for me and I'm sure there's a lot of different twist and turns to any music lover in general. Not as good as it's follower album MOONBABIES, This particular piece is wonderful because the musicians has taste, they never work "too hard -too cool" in this arrangements. Donati, Sherinian and McAlpine seems to have a partnership of years, while this is basically they first album together. The result is great, really, the musicality of the album is everywhere and the band just reached every standard of quality, both of production, sound quality, stimulant purposes that really excite me every time I push play.

On in on, maybe I'm talking too much and saying the same. Well, such is life. I think that if you just put attention to the music and close your eyes, you will have a wonderful journey of sounds and you will have fun along with it, for sure. This is good for both jazz and prog metal fans, maybe a little more pushed to heavy fans, something that they eventually tuned down in their next releases.

Strong 4 stars album, just a bit less tasted than their wonderful MOONBABIES. Hope to hear more of them any time soon.

As an ending, maybe the only problem with the album is that it's too much alike to Derek Sherinian own albums. This music is better oriented, better composed, but sometimes is hard to distinguish some parts of the song. But even like that, it's really and excellent addition to any prog collection. And I'm very glad that this album is part of mine.

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