CONQUER THE WORLD PT. 4

This album sounds like the band is coming into their style. That style is very much like Tool at times, and other times more commercial sounding like "alt-metal" bands such as Disturbed, System of a Down, or SlipKnot.

The progressive side seems to emerge more as the band progresses (pun intended!) through their "Conquer the World" series. By part 4, it seems like they're roughly 60% prog and 40% more commercial.

For someone who hasn't listened to them at all before, this wouldn't be a terrible starting point. If you were to start at part 1, you wouldn't hear much prog at all and perhaps lose interest before getting here. However, it seems to me like the two styles don't necessarily sit well with each other. They sound like a band on the fence, not sure if they want to make it big commercially or make arty prog metal. I'm not saying that either style is played poorly. The more commercial songs are good - "9Friends" and "Days of November" are the type of thing that would play well alongside the above mentioned bands. One of my favorite tracks on here is "Red Label Society" and that one doesn't even reach the 4-minute mark. After a slow intro, the song explodes into a frantic 6/8 riff that calms down into a 7/8 verse with some intense vocals.

There are some longer songs too, four of the songs are over 5 minutes and 2 of them are 9+ minutes. Yes, those are the proggier ones. "Yessyana" is the longest of those and is a nice intense thing that sounds like it would have fit in on a Tool album. I think Antoine might have been trying to emulate Maynard from Tool on vocals on some of these songs.

One thing that might turn some listeners off is the abundance of profanity (progfanity?) in some of the songs. I wouldn't say that true proggers don't use it (have "progressed" beyond it?) but some would say that the more sophisticated prog style should also reflect some refinement in the lyrical stylings too. Overall, I'm giving this 3 stars, but I think 3.5 might be my actual vote.