FEEL EUPHORIA

This album reminds me a lot of 'A Trick of the Tail' by Genesis. The music is good and all, but without the former front man, something's missing. Neal Morse was the Peter Gabriel of Spock's Beard, and once he left, the quality of the music seemed to drop a little bit.

The two previous albums were definitely Spock's Beard's best work. They both deserve 5 star ratings, so it was a huge disappointment to see the music become like this. You kind of have to cut these guys some slack though, because their songwriter left, and these guys managed to write their own decent prog music. Now keep in mind, all of the music for the most part is still good. There's obviously some filler throughout the album, but nothing's awful.

Another noticeable trait of this album is that it's not as progressive as some of their previous efforts. Sure the epic 'A Guy Named Sid' is 20 minutes, but for the most part, it's similar to pop/rock.

The first song 'Onomatopoeia' is a nice hard rock song. It's not very progressive, but is a solid track. That's basically the speed that the entire album travels at. Good, but not a masterpiece. It's a decent overall album. I feel that I should also mention that the epic 'A Guy Named Sid' is too long. I wouldn't mind if it was only 10 minutes, because it drags on for the most part. The song kind of feels like they were thinking 'let's see what we could add to make this 20 minutes' instead of 'we have all these great ideas, so let's turn them into an epic'.

It's obvious that these guys were struggling after Neal Morse's departure, but they pulled off a decent album with a few memorable moments. If you were to start with post-Neal Morse SB music, I would suggest going their S/T album, but this isn't an awful choice either.

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