THE NEVER ENDING ILLUSION

There's something I find so paradoxical in progressive music, and especially progressive music journalism, is that you want to support your genre so much, but sometimes you just can't. The world of progressive metal is one that has a lot of naysayers and a lot of supporters at the same time, and being one of the supporters it's rare that I find a band that's not easy to lend support to. Daedalus is on their second album with The Never Ending Illusion, and it's an album that is produced strongly with some ace playing and writing.

And yet, there's something missing.

Yes, as a journalist it's easy to sit on our high horses and call down whatever we feel like, and this is something that I've been accused of before, but hey, I call 'em as I see 'em. I must say that this band has a head and shoulders up on the last band I thrashed who was trying to make an entrance, but while the band has good technical chops and ability to write, they still need to sharpen their skills in a particular area, and I'm talking about the originality department. Let's cut all the trying to be nice and the pussyfooting short and cut to the chase here ? these guys sound exactly like Dream Theater if Dream Theater were to rewrite their material from Awake today. They tune their guitars low, have some chunky Petrucci like riffs and a keyboard that sounds like it was stolen from Kevin Moore. The singer tries a little to hard to sound like James LaBrie, because 9 times out of 10 you can't tell the two apart.

So in other words, the band kind of sounds like an uninspired Dream Theater, is there anything else to them than that? No, not really, there's a bunch of songs that, while impressive, don't make you want to come back for more because you've heard it all before, but done better and about 16 years ago. From Perfect Smile onwards there's very few moments where the band actually sounds like themselves, most of the time they're just cloning around. Waiting for the Dream is actually a pretty impressive opener, it's just a shame that the moment is so brief.

There is one savable song on here, and holy mother of hell! What a song! A Journey To Myself is a brilliant piece, and perhaps the only entire song where the band doesn't sound like they were creeping around DT's knees during the Systematic Chaos sessions collecting offcuts from the floor. It opens with a fun keyboard section before pushing full throttle into the main song. This is where everything comes together, and honestly, if the entire album had been like this is it would have been SO amazing! If you're going to buy this album then make sure you crank this song to maximum volume, because it certainly deserves it.

Once again, I wish I had more good things to say about this album, but for the majority it just really erks me, and I don't find much reason to put it on other than for A Journey To Myself. Still, if you're a big Daedalus fan or someone who really, really likes the Dream Theater sound and wants to hear this album then buy it for sure, because there's nothing wrong with it at it's core. My advise to the band would be to write more original sounding material, even something quirky with A Journey To Myself because that's really killer material, and stop trying to follow in the shoes of people who get enough criticism as it is. 2 stars out of 5.

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