FUTURE IMPACT OF PAST DIVERSIONS

In February 2022 I reviewed the debut of this Finnish Heavy Prog project sovereignly led by composer, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Tomi Kankainen. Now he kindly gave me the opportunity to share my impressions on the second album. Heavy or Metal music not being my field, I'm afraid I don't have much new to say.

Apart from a very slight and undoubtedly deliberate stuffiness in the soundscape -- nothing seriously wrong with it, it's more about my personal taste really --, the production is again very good. Tomi is a rare multi-instrumentalist in that aspect that he's a very competent singer, too. He's only accompanied by drummer Petri Honkonen, and Markus Jämsen plays guitar solos on four tracks. Despite the restricted number of musicians the album's sound is extremely broad and strong. One could think of an amalgamation of Prog Metal à la Dream Theater, more or less Neo-flavoured modern Prog Rock such as Lonely Robot, and some later era of RUSH when they were pretty heavy and still used synths. The general mood of the album is rather dark, perhaps slightly dystopic in its modernity.

Those listeners deeper into Heavy/Metal may disagree with me to some degree, but to me personally the weak side of this album -- can't help, I'm again repeating myself from the debut review -- is the feeling that most compositions follow the similar pattern. The pattern itself is admittedly good and effective. It's full of highly charged energy, and also from the melodic point of view the compositions have substance. But I as a listener would have wanted more radical differences in the song structures. There are some more spatial and calmer moments within the pieces to fully justify the airy and excellent cover design, but in the end most of the songs remind each other a bit too much in my opinion.

Towards the end things get better. 'The Waiting Room' with its slow intro is among my highlights, and the finest piece is definitely the nearly 11-minute long, three-part final piece 'Factory Shadow'. In one Finnish review the ghost of Marillion (the later era, I bet) is said to be hovering above it, and I can relate to that, although Rush is perhaps sonically closer. My rating is 3½ and I round it upwards since I don't want to imply that this was any less powerful and well done than the debut.