SONGS FROM THE LIONS CAGE

Arena's first record "Songs from the Lions Cage" from 1995 is a sometimes powerful album. The sound is dramatic and dark and proves inspiration from Marillion and Genesis. Though I am not very impressed. What I liked was the skillful guitar and piano playing, the vocalist John Carson who almosts sounded like Fish and the long frameless compositions. What I miss was more originality and innovations in the music. I also think this is too dark music. When every song goes in minor I begin to wonder if music have to be dark to be progressive.

These are the songs I like best here: "Solomon", a marvelous track that is dark but very deep and amazing in many ways. It's something to relisten to. I am very found of the singers English accent. "Crying for help IV" has a wonderful melody and "Crying for help I" is an acoustic guitar journey. "Valley of the Kings" gives you much information and is exciting to listen to. A lot of 80s feeling too. But still this wasn't thrilling me to ecstasy. This wasn't challenging enough for me. Not bad at all and some track will I come back to for exploring but in my taste the lack of genuineness disturbed me. Perhaps I wasn't in the mood for Neo-Prog.

I think in particular the lack of distinct meldodies and the over all dark feeling made me little bored. Skillfully performed and certainly something for you who love Neo-Prog.