SUSPENDED ANIMATION DREAMS

This was perhaps the first prog metal I ever came into contact with and boy was I lucky to discover this gem. This album features an amalgamation of several different genres - seemlessly, it's got jazz, death metal, prog and space rock and not only that it takes some of the best parts from each.

The albums starts out with the very chilled introductory song, a very fitting preface. The second song wolf among sheep (or maybe the other way around) is my favourite song on the album and also simply one of my favourite songs, it starts with a very beautiful acoustic section with a nice warm organ, a very good chord progression and some excellent harmonised vocal work. Then the song is cast into a burning pit of sludge and death metal whilst still retaining the musical complexity of the previous section (it has piano in this part and by god it somehow works), and then the release and we are greeted with some great violin work. Fantastically written music, very melodically rich, very dark and very rewarding.

No place like home is another fantastic song, a jolly song with some great harmonica and other stuff (invokes images of wind in the willows for me) and then we're cast into the pit with the death metal again but it is again melodically rich and tempered with violin and then we are sent into our warm cosy spacey world again.

Awake is the epic on the album and it too is a great song - melancholy, amazing female vocals throughout with some great vocal soloing going on around the 9 minute mark. it also degenerates into an ethnic freakout after some symphonic goodness and we end on a metallic note.

X is a great finale, beautiful, spacey, awesome black chick singing, climatic solo to finish it all off - outstanding.

A very very interesting, rewarding and different album recommended to most prog fans, I was a huge fan of this even when I didn't like metal at all that's how diverse this album is.