21 EYES OF RUBY

There is even nylon string guitar and piano on one track - Anthem for a Butterfly. The dynamic variety helps to make this a bit more proggy than the previous metal assaults, which might be what you're looking for - in which case part 4 might be your best bet. This one still sounds like it was made by a metal band, but one showing some more restraint and artistic tendencies than previously. You still get plenty of the heavy stuff too, don't worry.

It seems odd to me that the last two songs - "Pizzi" and "Out of Heart" are really the same song, just done a bit differently in terms of instrumentation and interpretation. Neither is a prog interpretation.

We do have our proggier showings here too - you may want to skip directly to "Make a Mess" (if you can stand the F- word multiple times in a song), or "In Vain/Carmine" and "Unfold Your Mind" for the more epic tracks. All in all, though, this is probably one you could live without. 2 stars.

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.

With just 3.5 minutes duration, this alternative rock semi-ballad fails to impress the listener. The prog element is missing altogether and the rather simplistic semi-acoustic song pattern (in the vein of Alice in Chains) tends to be rather forgettable. This single could potentially work if the band intends to reach commercial radios but I find it rather unrepresentative of their sound, at least the one in their latest (at the time of writing) ''To Conquer the World pt.5''. You could give it a try yourselves as it is free to download on their bandcamp page, but if you are looking for prog material, you would be better of starting with their latest release.