THE WHIRLWIND

When I first spun this up I was (forgive the pun) blown away by Transatlantic's third album which not only recaptured the style and bombast of SMPte and Bridge but moved on from those earlier works. We had the symphonic overblown wonderfulness, we had the catchy riffs and lyrics (The Wind Blew them all away), so by the time of Out of the Night (31 minutes in) I was truly hooked, and this continued through the next few tracks.

Then it all went horribly wrong. The closing tracks of this album are excruciatingly bad - I mean not just excoriatingly bad but excrementally bad. So bad I wanted to claw my ears off and reverse time so that they never existed and had never been recorded.

Now I know Neal Morse is a bit of a god-botherer and a bit of a message is not to be unexpected but there is a difference between the subtle approach of, say, Snow or even Sola Scriptura and the closing 20 minutes of the Whirlwind which is pure christian polemic and suffers musically for it.

I guess the message is this - leaving religion out of it - if you are going to make a 77 minute epic... don't fuck it up in the last 20 minutes.