WHILE THE WORLD AWAITS

Tunnelvision were a Helsinki-based Finnish prog metal band that released two albums some twenty years ago. I'm certainly not a metal listener, but I daresay they had a lot of potential for a wider success. Here in ProgArchives only two reviews for the second album Tomorrow (2002) have been written, none for this debut which is perhaps more progressive and better.

Technical capacity is pretty high concerning the whole quintet. By the way, bassist Lauri Porra (whose band history includes a better known metal group Stratovarius) is one of the most respected Finnish bass players and he has also become an excellent and eclectic solo artist and composer. The true progressive soul of the original line-up was however keyboard player Kari Tornack. According to the band interview in the Finnish prog magazine Colossus, he admired bands such as Yes and U.K. The album info here says that on keyboards is Vili Ollila, but I understood he replaced Tornack for the second album. I may be wrong. Comparing the albums I do think the keys sound brighter and more melodic -- in a proggy way -- on the debut.

Tunnelvision declared to combine the prog tradition with modern metal. Well, the world is full of Dream Theater followers, but Tunnelvision succeeded in their goal better than their low level of fame and the brief career would imply. Guitarist Juhani Malmberg's style is mostly rather typical for the metal genre as is the high speed rhythm section, but there are also plenty of Neo Prog elements in the group's sound, and for this thing one must thank especially the keyboards reminiscent of Clive Nolan's work on Arena and other bands.

The vocalist Marko Waara also makes me think of Arena since his powerful and passionate expression reminds me of Rob Sowden. Perhaps even more closely his voice resembles Midge Ure of Ultravox -- only with a more metallic edge of course.

For the compositional structures this album could admittedly be more progressive. Instead of containing many shortish pieces, a more epic approach would fit very well together with the Neo-ish sound. Anyway, I think they lost some of the prog spirit on their second and last album which is a more average work of melodic metal. If you like THRESHOLD, you might like to check out Tunnelvision.