THE SPECTRE WITHIN

Spectre Within is really dissapointing release, as the CD cover is the only exciting thing about the whole package. Songs are indeed intriguing - but only for a minute or so. After each so-called prog moment or change in rhythm, songs start to loose direction, falling into boringness (instead into the prog dephts expected). Surely, production and guitars are heavy, and that's a plus, but songwriting is simply uninventive, boring and pushy. It seems like that Fates Warning took the amount and lenght of songs needed for a solid metal album (along with guitar riffs) from Iron Maiden, mixing it with early Rush's rhythm changes within an album structure. That might sound promising, but not if you deliberately extend songs to last eight or ten minutes and than change tempo just to fill those same minutes!

The major problem with this release is that Fates Warning were not prepared for a proper prog-metal release (only few were at a time and the band is not blamed for that!) and that the band should stick to short heavy metal songs instead of copying Iron Maiden masterpieces. Shallow listener might consider this record as an early attempt in prog-metal, but I just don't buy it.