IN SPACE AND TIME

I saw that this album was on the 2020 charts, so I decided to check it out, especially as it's coming from India, a country that doesn't have very many prog artists.

Unfortunately, I can't exactly say that I'm impressed with the album. First off, the production is pretty flat and uninspired; everything is compressed to an absurd degree, to the point that the "heavier" sections can't even really be referred to as such, as they kind of just sound mostly the same as the rest of it. The vocals are mixed very poorly; they kind of just sit by themselves on top of the mix instead of being incorporated into it. The mix is also very inconsistent?sometimes, the vocals are way too hot in front of everything else; sometimes, they just kind of sit in the back. The same goes for some of the instrumental sections; for example, the solo(s) at the end of "Circles" are inexplicably much louder than the rest of the mix.

The album's aesthetic and sound is also extremely derivative; it sounds like the generic amalgamation of every "atmospheric prog" album ever. The lyrics are mostly a bunch of basic abstract BS. Every synth pad used on the album is completely indistinct and relatively boring, and every song has the typical arpeggiated clean guitar parts with an absurd amount of delay slapped onto them.

This brings me to one of my biggest gripes about the album, which is the extremely lazy use of processing effects. It doesn't feel like the band actually tried to dial in specific sounds on any of the effects they used; the aforementioned delays drown many of the guitar parts out. Some of the most egregious instances of this happen on the song "Satellite", specifically the chorus effect on the chorus vocals (ironically) and the stereo tremolo on what I believe is the rhythm guitar around 5:45.

Really the album's only redeeming track is "Circles", which despite its mixing issues, at least has some feeling to it (though most of it gets murdered by the unbelievably compressed production), plus the closing solo is fairly decent, if way too loud.

All in all, this is really just a generic, poorly produced atmospheric prog album. 2/5.