BLINK OF AN EYE

It's as if ENCHNAT became a musical force to be reckoned with in a "Blink Of An Eye". On the contrary, the have paid some dues and they already had a few releases behind them before they put it all together to reach the dizzying heights of this recording. They don't like to be tagged as any one type of band. I just can't help calling them progressive though, although their sound is clearly beyond one genre. They play with razor sharp precision jumping back and forth and all around using different styles and influences as a springboard to launch their ear-crunching sound. To be more specific, they are metal-prog with influences of rock, progressive rock, and smatterings of pop here and there. They even have been called neo-prog and the like. What the hell is neo? I think that's just a cop out and not committing to giving a band their due. The lead singer Ted Leonard sounds like a carbon copy of Steve Walsh at the height of his powers as the vocalist for KANSAS. So with all of that information you should be able to come up with a picture of what they sound like rather quickly right? Not necessarily. You have to hear this to develop your own opinion.

I loved their sound and their attitude without exception. They are all at once hard biting, driving, beautiful, and complex. For me that spells P R O G R E S S I V E. It's not progressive as all of you advanced listeners out their understand it to be; this is not like DREAM THEATER or YES for instance. I have to be fair, and I also agree with the group. Let's just say that they are flexible and able to mix up their sound very well all the while maintaining their cutting edge hard progressive leanings.

The first track "Under Fire" really sets things ablaze in a heartbeat, and from that point on there is no taking the finger off of the rock 'n' roll trigger. They never run out of ammunition, in fact, this band is like a machine gun with a perpetual round, it never stops. Other standout tracks are "Seeds Of Hate," "My Everafter," and the awesome curtain closer "Prognosis." I have to say even though I feel those tracks are exceptional, the entire CD is dazzling. This is a consistent effort all they way through without any flaws or let downs. I think every track offers a variety of listeners a chance to warm up to their sound. For hard rockers, pop lovers, and the straight ahead no bull[&*!#] prog-rockers, there is something to latch onto and take to the next level. And it all fits into their varied circle of influences.

You have to have progressive ears to really appreciate this kind of music. If you're a stick in the mud or go muddling through life with one eye open, then this is not for you. The bottom line here is you have to ask yourself the question - Do you like to rock? If you do you will love this. This kind of music has boundless energy, its always exciting, and it makes you feel so alive. For me that is what I live for, I want the music to move me like that. ENCHANT did it for me, so much that I had to hear it all over again shortly after I heard it the first time. I really have to enjoy something to listen again right away. And inevitably I heard some more the second time around that I didn't catch on the first ride. Check it out; you will understand everything I am talking about in no time. ENCHANT has arrived.

Rating: 4.5/5

Another quality product by Enchant.

15 years ago, Rush started to lose most of his perk and creativity. The art rock king bowed his head after Counterparts, leaving now a great amount of space for the formula they created in the 90's: a blend of brain/ brawl rock and great tecnics. I was happily surprised when hearing Blink an Eye, boy does it feels like Rush!

Well, it's not carbon copy Rush. First, the drumming cannot be compared to Neil's extraordinaire performances. Second, the keyboard work is somewhat different, Enchant will have many keyboard solos throughout the album and Rush hasn't. Tertio, the vocal departement could please a larger public with Enchant. Leonard doesn't even ressembles a tad to Geddy Lee, but he gives impressive vocal liftups in many occasions.

On the other side, the song structures is closer to what Rush did in albums like Power Windows or Hold You Fire. This is the first album with a keyboard player as a real member of the band, and it's showing. The keyboards are more present, but also less 'Rushable'. It's a real keys solo now, not just the traditional beep and bleep. The guitar solos and accompaniment are probably the most recognizable sound in the whole plot. Many times I thought hearing a Lifeson riff here and there. The bass lines are complicated and thickens the sound real good too, the phantom of Lee or Squire is clearly heard.

With all those influences about the canadian trio, is Enchant strong enough to stand up on it's own legs? Of course, proof: I wouldn't be ashamed to play this in front of straight FM rockers and it would satisfy the hunger for heavy riffs and modern keyboard lovers. The influences will probably ring to you ears if you're (very) familiar with Rush. For others, you'll probably think you've ecountered the best record of the year.

I feel attached to Enchant for the same reasons that I did for Rush: good humor, sky high skills and tune that sticks in your head for dayz.

Vote for Enchant as underdogs of the 2K.

Another flawless effort from these San Fransisco rockers. I said it before and I'll say it again, they just don't produce anything poor. Also on this album it's hard to find even the lesser songs. Maybe Faltline and Invisible are the lesser ones but even they are very good.

The first two tracks are meant to get you in the groove before the highlight of the album appears. Seeds of hate is an incredible track to me because of the brilliant guitar solo in the middle. This song is one of their best efforts ever. After Flatline we get the ballad of the album and it's a very nice one. Next are two special songs, two that are more or less unique in their history, highly original. Invisible is followed by Dispicable, another very nice rocking track before the great instrumental Prognosis closes things down.

So another very fine album by Enchant that is again a doubtful case between 4 and 5 stars. Not a masterpiece, so 4.

Another melodic record with great vocals, but i've felt that with their last three studio albums something is missing. I know i'm in the minority with these thoughts, but I like their early recordings a lot better. With this album I was impressed with the first track and I thought the lyrics for the second song were clever. The rest is good but not anywhere near great.

"Under Fire" in my opinion is one of their best songs ever. The title of this album is in the chorus. Some wailing guitar 4 minutes in with a ripping solo to end it. "Monday" opens with heavy drums and some great vocals. The lyrics are about living in the real world but dreaming of something better. "Seeds Of Hate" has some heaviness to it especially 3 minutes in followed by some scorching guitar. Another guitar solo starts tastefully before it ends up being on fire.

"Flat Line" has an excellent intro but that's all folks. "Follow The Sun" is not very good in my opinion. It's ok, but the worst yet. That is until the "Ultimate Gift" arrives with lyrics that are full of sugar. "My Everafter" is better. It's heavier with synths. It turns mellow before a minute. The contrast continues. Some nice guitar work after 3 1/2 minutes. Check out the bass a minute later. "Invisible" has some beautiful guitar work on the second half. "Despicable" is a rocker with some fantastic vocals. It cooks before 3 minutes with some blistering guitar.

If you like melodic music with some bite check this band out.

Blink of An Eye is the fifth studio album from Enchant ( Still not counting Time Lost as a real studio album). Drummer and co-composer Paul Craddick left Enchant after Juggling 9 or Dropping 10. It´s unfortunately hearable on Blink of An Eye which cannot live up to it´s predecessor´s high quality. His replacement Sean Flanegan is a very accomplished drummer though so it´s more in the songwriting I think it´s clear that Paul Craddick is missed.

The style is still unmistakably Enchant. Blink of An Eye can be compared to the style Enchant played on both Break and Juggling 9 or Dropping 10 which means basic power chord guitar riffs, keyboard backgrounds and Ted Leonard´s distinct and beautiful voice. This is soft progressive metal/ rock. There are guitar solos occasionally but the music is generally pretty simple and based much on Ted Leonard´s vocal melodies.

All songs are good, but there are not many excellent songs on Blink of An Eye. The few standout tracks are the opener Under Fire which is a really good song, Monday which is a mid paced emotional track and Flatline which I for some reason like very much even though the chorus is very commercial. The rest is more or less good and nothing more except for Ultimate Gift were Enchant crosses my line and makes an unbelievably cheesy semi ballad. The lyrics are hidious.

The musicianship is very good.

The production is excellent. Maybe a bit too nice, but really well done.

Blink of An Eye is a good album, but compared to Break and Juggling 9 or Dropping 10 it´s a bit disappointing IMO. It´s still a worthy purchase though and I´ll rate it 3 stars.

A promising mix of artistic hard rock pokes itself in the eyes after an excellent start, making Blink of an Eye a missed, but not totally wasted listen.

Enchant's compositions are generally quite good, earnestly performed and possessing an optimistic charm which makes some of them enjoyable. While superficially melodic art-rock, there is an air of the neo-prog genre throughout, due mostly to the prevalence of keyboard textures and guitar effects. The first three songs are great, with a nice heavy, artistic feel, cool hooks, and fine soloing. Successive songs spiral downward in quality and never recover, with the final third or so being mired in a syrupy-sweet mess of directionless ballads and ineffective faux-metal crunch. Not a catastrophy, but nothing to make more than a superficial impression on the listener. I feel like the band wants to go in a more serious direction but is making concessions for the sake of approachability.

The players are talented, and quite energetic during the instrumental and solo sections of the songs, though they unfortunetly fade into a secondary role when Leonard's vocals are on-- which is too bad. His voice has a high, clear, and whiney timbre which is overpowering in all of these songs. His inflection and energy will probably appeal to those easily enjoying melodic "happy" songs-- but I was left very cold. His range is poor, so the ears will take a shrill beating by this album's conclusion. This, combined with very self-aware lyrics made many of these songs feel philosophically bleeding heart and contrived.

I would of have easily given Blink of an Eye a three-star rating if it were an instrumental album, because the playing here has some real potential to entertain, as heard in the all instrumental bonus track "Prognosis"-- easily the best track on the album. I'd say it's about time for a "band meeting" to tender Leonard his resignation.

Songwriting: 3 Instrumental Performances: 3 Lyrics/Vocals: 2 Style/Emotion/Replay: 2

By 2002 Enchant reaches to number 5 album from their career named Blink of an eye release by Insideout label and features same excellent atmosphere and musicnship like on previous album Juggling who was for me a 4 star album. With this one Ennchant remanins in first league in my opinion delivering some fantastic heavy prog not far from Rush or Tiles with some leanings in places with Yes or Dream Theater in some more up tempo moments. The musicianship is top notch, specially the drummer, realy realy great musician Sean Flanegan is his names, and in some moements is absolutly a god on the instrument just check out Monday , Under fire or Invisible. Art rock resemblance in parts with a good doze of artistic complexity tipycal for progressive rock music makes from Enchant a great band not yet fully discovered by many. The voice of Ted Leonard is like a gove on the music, high register but what a pleasent and unique voice he has, great. Tight musicianship, specially on instrumental passages, Prognosis is aswell an instrumental piece entirely where the band shines for sure every second even without the diamond voice of Leonard. Blink of an eye desearves another 4 star album to me like predecesor. Recommended if you are more towards , Rush, Tiles or this type of prog music.

I can still remember how impressed I was when I heard the debut Enchant album, 'A Blueprint For The World' but that was many years ago now and as I had also been suitably impressed by their last album 'Juggling 9 Or Dropping 10' I was intrigued to see what their sixth studio album would bring. The band is built around the song-writing and guitar playing of Doug Ott and the wonderful vocals of Ted Leonard. Put them together with bassist Ed Platt and new drummer Sean Flanegan and the result is Spock's Beard meeting Kansas and an album that is superb.

It is very American, but as they are then that should be okay, and this is a highly-crafted rock album that has almost as many influences in the AOR field as it does in the prog scene. It is not prog metal in the same vein as Threshold, more a prog rock act with the emphasis on rock. There are plenty of hooks and melodies, along with strong soaring vocals that are very reminiscent of Steve Walsh (no bad thing) or Steve Perry.

It is an album that all prog fans that enjoy melodic music to listen to and enjoy (as opposed to some of the cutting edge stuff that is like having teeth pulled) should discover immediately if not sooner.

Originally appeared in Feedback #69, Aug 02

Enchant was new to me when they participated in the 1995 Magna Carta Yes tribute Tales from Yesterday, to which they contributed a too-faithful rendition of "Changes." I found singer Ted Leonard to be a bit grating, so I rarely listened to it. Still, when I saw a used copy of Blink of an Eye for sale about then years later, I decided to pick it up. I wasn't terribly blown away when I listened to it the first time, although I thought that Leonard's vocal style was much more suited for the band's original material. Anyway, I then forgot about Enchant for another fifteen years or so.

Earlier this year I purchased my first Spock's Beard album, Noise Floor. It was OK, though not great. But interestingly, the lead singer on Noise Floor was Ted Leonard. So I decided to give Blink of an Eye a closer listen.

Blink of an Eye is, my opinion, correctly classified as "heavy prog." Depending on where you drop the needle, it can sound like neo-prog ("Follow the Sun," "Despicable") or Dream-Theater-inspired prog metal (especially on parts of "Monday," "Seeds of Hate," and "Invisible"). A few songs, including the album-opening "Under Fire," "Flat Line," and "Ultimate Gift," are AOR-crossovers.

But from top to bottom, Blink of an Eye is risk-averse. The moves seem to be taken right out of the same late-1990s playbook used by Cairo, Magellan (both of whom are on Tales from Yesterday), and more than a few others. To be fair, that playbook is not inflexible; "Flat Line" and "My Everafter" stand out among the more pedestrian songs on Blink of an Eye, the former because of its melody and lyrics, the latter because of its chord sequence. And Leonard's vocals are much better than they were on "Changes."

In short, Enchant plays it too safe with Blink of an Eye. I get the sense that this is a group that could've produced a more inventive set of songs, but chose to stick to a formula. Maybe their other albums are more adventurous

Enchant's sixth album, Blink of an Eye, comes amidst a time of changes for the band. For their first five albums, their lineup had been fairly stable; bassist Ed Platt had, for reasons I've not been able to track down, not been involved in the recording of Break, but he was back in the fold for Juggling 9 and Dropping 10 - at which point longstanding keyboardist Michael Geimer departed, followed by drummer Paul Craddick a while after that.

This release would see Sean Flanegan take over at the drumstool, but the band did not yet have a permanent replacement keyboardist; Douglas Ott filled the gap for the time being, with guest Phil Bennett stopping by to add a few extra touches here and there. (Subsequent to this release, Bill Jenkins would join to take up the keyboard post long-term.)

Of course, musicians join and leave bands all the time - it's par for the course. However, as well as being their original drummer Craddick was also one of Enchant's key songwriters, making extensive contributions to all their prior albums on that front. In fact, he'd get at least a co-writing credit on the majority of the songs on more or less every previous album except Break (where he still wrote music for four of the ten songs).

As such, losing him didn't just mean losing a drummer - it also meant the band lost a key creative mind, and whilst Flanegan seems entirely competent behind the drumstool, he doesn't step in to fill the songwriting gap here. (He wouldn't get credited with any songwriting on the followup, Tug of War, either, but would get cowriting credits on four songs on the reunion album The Great Divide.)

I don't say this as a slam on Flanegan - if you're the new guy coming into a band which has just lost a couple of long- standing measures it can be sensible to hang back a little and get a sense of the group's internal chemistry before you start pushing your own ideas. However, the upshot of Craddick leaving is that only Douglas Ott and Ted Leonard get any songwriting credits on this album, making it the Enchant album with the least number of distinct individuals contributing to the songwriting. (The songwriting pool would widen again with Tug of War.)

That might explain some of Blink of an Eye's issues. In some cases, narrowing down the range of people contributing to songs can be a smart move; it can help to focus your sound and hone in on a distinct creative vision, rather than sprawling to try and accommodate everyone's ideas. In other situations, however, losing someone from a songwriting team is a net negative: what you might gain in some respects you ultimately lose through the simple fact that you have one less person throwing ideas into the pot.

In Enchant's case, I would say the latter situation applies. Enchant's sound prior to this was based on a smorgasboard of influences - neo-prog like Marillion, IQ, and Jadis, prog metal and heavy prog like Dream Theater or Rush, and from Break onwards an increasing influence from melodic alt-rock. That's at least two distinct flavours of prog, plus influences from outside of prog, all representing distinct strands in their music; you can see how it would be a challenge to come up with musical ideas which cover all those bases at once.

By comparison, to my ears the sound of Blink of an Eye feels like it's just a little bit blander than usual. Little musical development over Juggling 9 Or Dropping 10 is evident, and for a band which had made an admirable show of significantly developing and shifting its music from album to album that's unfortunate. To the extent there is a change, everything sounds a little bit more same-y than it did before - which is not a positive development -and it feels like the Rush influence that had cropped up frequently has been dialled back a lot. (If Craddick was responsible for a lot of the Rush-isms, that might be why - he'd hardly be the first drummer to look up to Neal Peart, after all...)

Don't get me wrong, this isn't flat-out horrible - you don't put it on and think that Enchant have suddenly lost all ability to play their instruments. It's nice, entertaining melodic rock with heavy touches here and there and some prog sensibilities... but it's one of those albums where I can sit here and listen to the entire thing start to finish, and when the final track ends I cannot remember a single goddamn part of it. It's pleasant enough in the moment, but there's nothing here which'd stay with you, and as such it feels like a comparatively lukewarm effort by Enchant's standards.