TEMPLE OF THE CAT

Temple of the Cat is the 7th track of Ayreon's Universal Migrator Part I album and it is sang by Jacqueline Govaerts. I must say, I really do not like this singer's voice and the song is quite boring. Perhaps one of the only songs I do not like on the brilliant Universal Migrator albums. The singer has an awful, bland voice, even though technically, its fine.

The single/EP also contains My House on Mars, which is a great song with a beautiful performance done by the Tiamat Singer and the singer from After Forever, Floor Jansen. Both contain contrasting voices and emotions. Tiamat is of course a sadder, more depressed band and Johan does a great job with the depressing part of the song, Floor, an amazing operatic voice does the contrasting, brighter voice. THe instrumentation on this song is very good.

Valley of the Queens is a short song, I can't really describe it well enough but that its not one of Ayreon's better songs.

This EP is good, as is all of Ayreon's material, but however, I'd recommend buying the entire Universal Migrator Pt 1+ 2 Bonus edition instead.

Jacqueline Govaert (not Govaerts) has a beautiful voice, although it's not the BEST version of the song there is! I own this single, signed by her. There are 2 more versions, and 1 of those is featured on this single too, and the "previously unreleased" version, as mentioned here, features another singer (NOT Jacqeline) which, in my opinion, sounds afwul.

On the album "Ayreonauts Only", you can find the THIRD version of this song. It's acoustic by the way, and sung by Astrid van der Veen. She does a great job and sings way more adventurous and melodic than both singers featured here.

My house on mars is a fine progressive metal-que song and Valley Of The Queens is pure magic with the amazing Anneke van Giersbergen (from the Dutch progressive band "The Gathering"). One of the better Ayreon-songs I think.

Overall, this is a good single because it's a nice melodic accesible song, and the b-sides are worth listening to due to their length and colour.

Temple of the Cat was a single released by Ayreon off of the Dream Sequencer album (Part 1 of the Universal Migrator). Of all the songs on Dream Sequencer it was probably the best suited for radio due to its structure and length. However, it is also the weakest track from the album. It featured guest vocalist Jacqueline Govaert (Krezip).

The song is part of a bigger storyline in which the last human (a Martian colonist) travels back in time using a Dream Sequencer machine. On Temple of the Cat, this colonist's adventure takes him into the mind of a Mayan around the 8th century A.D. It makes mention of the Jaguar Temple and the city of Tikal.

I think there are two versions of this single. One contains four tracks, the other three. The four-track version contains Temple of the Cat, another version of Temple of the Cat with Lana Lane, My House on Mars (also from Dream Sequencer), and Valley of the Queens (from Into the Electric Castle). The other version of which I'm not familiar with is an acoustic version, plus the actual version, and also containing Nature's Dance (from the Final Experiment).

This is just a single and taken out of the context of the original album it belongs to doesn't mean a whole lot to anyone. Clearly this is only for collectors, die-hard fans, and completionists.