TWO HUNDRED PAGES

This appealing album from Germany's Ruhr region offers robust symphonic prog with lots of cool changes. It's a plot- driven concept album, apparently about an amnesiac recruited to commit a crime. I'm reminded a lot of times of IQ's post-Subterranea music, or maybe the Ad Infinitum album from 1998. Keyboards are rich and thick and guitars have a bit of a metallic edge. The singer, Raphael Gazal has great pipes and a touch of Dennis DeYoung about him. Favorite tracks are "Turn of Fortune," with its memorable chorus hook and some very pretty music in the more subdued passage at the end; the action-packed "Paralyzed"; and "Retrospective," with its pastoral guitar and synth flute intro and a strong vocal performance by Gazal. Momentous-sounding and dramatic music.