LAPLACIAN

Melodic and proficient synth-oriented NeoProg from England. The music on Laplacian is pretty good, it's just that it's a little too obvious that Jopheus' studio album music is predominantly controlled, programmed, and issued from a computer keyboard. This can be done well but not while using the kind of "dated" (1990s) sounds that Jopheus chooses (including/especially "bass", "piano", and "guitars"). The second "problem" I have with the music on this album is that it's very run-of-the-mill, stereotypic NeoProg, which, as I've been stating repeatedly over the past couple of years, feels as if it has been mined to death: it's as if we're now working on anything we can extract through the intensive extractive processes of shale oil mining, fracking, or even capturing fumes. Can music progress no more? Are we done? Condemned to work only from the combinations and permutations of existing sounds, instruments, and styles? Curtis Adamczyk's vocals are weak and poorly rendered in the engineering department (sounding just like they do in their live concert performance videos). Qualitatively this is really a three to 3.5 star album but the Burtonshaw brothers manage to eek out some exceptionally-engaging (and well-constructed) music (including the excellent epic "Where the Lack of Logic Lies") despite the equipment insufficiencies.