BODY OF MIND

A name like "House of Usher" has associations with Edgar Allan Poe and his famous tale, and as a result casts my mind back to the Alan Parsons project's debut album. While this is not a bad reference point for the sole album put forth by this band, they have a more modern neo-prog sound at times reminiscent of IQ.

What really hurts this album is the muddy production, so it does best when conveying a dark gothic atmosphere in which this shortcoming becomes an advantage , such as in the opener "Faith", "Don't Remind me", the piano dominated instrumental "911", the superb guitar solo that round outs "C'est Pas Fini Part 2", and "C'est Pas Fini Part 3". Aaron's voice seems especially well designed for songs in which each syllable is individually pronounced, almost as if English is not his first language. But in "Obsession" and "Bewildered Serenity", the atmosphere seems secondary to the message that the band is attempting to convey, and that message is lost in the morass.

This is a decent album from a band that apparently came and went, rounded up to three stars since so little of even this admittedly second tier caliber even comes out of the US.