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Ayreon - 01011001 CD (album) cover

01011001

Ayreon

 

Progressive Metal

3.91 | 702 ratings

From Progarchives.com, the ultimate progressive rock music website

Zitro
Prog Reviewer
2 stars A subpar concept album about an immortal and technologically advanced alien race hooked on machines, losing their emotions, and feeling hopeless about the future of the race. Seeing a comet about to collide with Earth (the one that extinguished the dinosaurs), they decided to plant their DNA on that comet. Initially, it was successful, but then humankind got hooked on machines, World of Warcraft, reality tv shows, World Wars and Myspace.

The music is carefully crafted, but for some reason, I find the music moderately dull, unoriginal, monotonous, and overlong. There are tons of talented musicians and vocalists trying to save this album, but desspite their good efforts, it was not enough. The problem is not the performance, but the songwriting, lack of diversity, and this ultra-perfect production which takes away feelings for me.

It begins with a solid, if unspectacular, Age of Shadows which sounds like a below-average outtake from their previous album, with the operatic vocals, ultra-crisp production, and then leads into a lady singing zeros and ones. It leads to a nice atmospherical percussion of Comatose but everything but the percussion is bland and badly written. Afterwards, Liquid Eternity woke me up from that coma and is a fantastic song with an instrumental section that carries a highly memorable theme.

After Liquid Eternity, the album ends up with many dull numbers and is a chore to listen to. Connect The Dots is especially a bad song, being poppish, carrying juvenile lyricss and being musically out of place. The following tracks are ok, but unexciting and stuff you heard in the previous albums, until you get into one of the most pathetic prog songs I've ever heard: a ballad accompanied with a cliched romantic motif and bland acoustic guitars. After Simone starts searching in google for PX, hopefully in forums, Fifth Extinction is next and becomes less laughable and musically ok, if uninteresting again. Waking Dreams is next and is more interesting as Tomas Bodin, from the Flower Kings, comes to the rescue with a good solo and someone else comes with an electric guitar and does a decent job. After a bunch of boring tracks, E = MC^2 is next and is one of the geekiest songs in the prog world. With dramatic and bombastic lyrics like let's break the equation, E equals M C squared!!!! and the electric guitar going berserk and undergoing nuclear fusion, this is a fun song with a great guitar solo from Romeo (Symphony X). The closing track sums up the album and is surprisingly good and interesting, you shouldn't be let down by that track and maybe ... just maybe will make you forget of the Simone lyrics of Web of Lies.

The story is not bad if you like these kinds of sci-fi stories, but the lyrics and especially the music severely ruins what could have been a good concept album. Hopefully this album will not spawn a religion nor be taught in school as Eternity design.

Zitro | 2/5 |

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