Look, I’ll start off the review by saying the obvious, and scaring off the 90% of you that just won’t get this album. First, this isn’t a Queensryche album. Second, it’s not even really a metal album. And if you best remember Tate as a guy racing through eight octaves of scales like an opera star on crystal meth, you aren’t going to like this at all. If any of these three things disturb you, go ahead and say “man, what a gyp,” and go back to downloading Dream Theater bootlegs.

Okay. In 2002, Queensryche lead singer Geoff Tate took a sidestep and decided to release this solo album on Sanctuary records. Instead of doing a prog-metal album with a different cast of musicians in his band, he decided to utilize his voice for a much more pop-oriented effort. That might sound quite crazy to some, but I can think of at least two good reasons for this. One is that he’s very talented and he could create something that would transcend the metal world and crack at all of the Peter Gabriels out there in the music world. The other reason is that Tate’s voice isn’t exactly as full-ranged as it was twenty years ago. You can notice this on Queensryche live albums where he really struggles with the older material. Yet, in the studio, he always finds a way to work around this and do “thicker” sounding things in lower registers that sound great, but aren’t the shrieking high-end opera wailing like the old albums. That’s the basic litmus test for this album: if you can enjoy the “newer” Geoff Tate vocals.

As I am not one of those “you must do it the exact same way your entire life and never change” metalheads, I welcome the change, and I found this album very interesting. The music here is much more laid-back than Queensryche, but Tate really takes the effort to try a few different things. Stuff like “Flood” almost sounds like it would belong on the new Peter Gabriel album, a slightly electronic backing with great vocals. That and “Forever” both sound like the kind of modern synth-pop song that makes a great single, and also lends itself to a good dance remix. “Helpless” goes into a more romantic sounding adult contemporary number, with Spanish guitar and sweeping choruses.

As far as the music, this is very much the type of contemporary arrangement with anonymous background players, lots of Pro-Tools, expert programming on the drum sounds and filling synths, and perfectly sculpted sound. There are no wailing guitar solos, thumping bass, or other metal-oriented dramatics. Imagine the sort of hit factories that turn out records for Alanis or any other FM superstar, and that’s where the mix here is aiming. And that’s not bad, because it’s got Geoff’s voice on top. He’s not breaking any wine glasses with his high register here, but damn, he is putting together such a smooth and complete sound here, that I’m surprised none of these songs ever broke out on the charts. It’s as if he’s been doing this all of his life, and somehow on a fluke ended up putting on some leather pants and fronting a prog-metal band for all of those years.

I should mention a few other songs on here that are relevant. The song “Every Move We Make” is a slower romantic number which is good, but it segues into “This Moment”, which is a great little ballad that sounds like it could have been sung 50 years ago by one of the crooner greats. “A Passenger” is one of my favorite songs, and almost sounds like it could have been a slower Queensryche song, or maybe something they would have done at the unplugged gig, because it’s got a mellower beat and a very smooth hook. “Off the TV” is the “radio” number, and the production and compressed verses of vocals sounds right for it; “Grain of Faith” is another poppier number that’s in the same vein. The two styles collide a bit for the closer “Over Me”, which is one of those songs with some power behind it, but it’s really talking about losing someone, so it’s not exactly happy, but that’s what you need to close up an album with a good punch.

Problems? There are a few. The album seems more like a grouping of eleven demos that were done in a sort of “see what I can do” fashion, like he was auditioning for a big label to pick him up. And because of that, there are little issues, like that some of the percussion was obviously dialed in on a synth or computer or whatever, like you’d do on a demo, before the drummer came in. Plus some tracks (like “Off the TV”) sound so much like a producer or studio tech said “this is what everyone wants, patch number 45A on ProTools, so let’s use that,” and I don’t entirely like when producers try to second-guess listeners like that - it’s a reason I don’t listen to adult contemporary all the time. There are also some continuity issues with all of these tracks, in that the album doesn’t flow as well as it could. Individual tracks are all great, but it’s a little hard to go through from end to end.

Overall, I like this. It’s one of those albums that didn’t take off, for all of the obvious reasons, but that I’ll always enjoy listening to. I know in ten years, nobody is going to know what the hell this is, but I’ll always go back to it and enjoy it.

Rating: 7.5

You know how now (with now being 2008), all of the major phone companies and wireless companies are merging together and buying each other out, so where before maybe you paid Southern Podunk Bell for your local line and ABC Wireless for your cell phone, and now you just make one check out to some huge monolith like Verizon? Well, basically the same thing was happening with prog-rock groups back in the mid-eighties, with all of the loose members of Yes and Genesis and Marillion and Asia and whatnot being all rolled together into big megagroups designed to succeed on the corporate level. GTR is an example of one of these prog-supergroup things. It’s also, unfortunately, a good example of how that doesn’t work, and indirectly, why Verizon is evil, but I’ll stick to the music part here and leave the phone company stuff for another forum.

Okay, so GTR was the meeting of Steve Howe (from Yes) and Steve Hackett (from Genesis), both guitar virtuosos. (Get it? GuiTaR -> GTR?) They got together with unknowns vocalist Max Bacon and bassist Phil Spalding, and session guy on drums Jonathan Mover. I’ll get the nice things out of the way first. This album went gold really fast, and a lot of people liked it, for about ten seconds, which dumbfounds me. I’m not saying that it’s total shit; I’m just saying it’s weird that they had a song get up to like #14 on the pop charts. That one song, “When the Heart Rules the Mind” had a lot of hook to it, but that’s it. Anything good you can say about this album is immediately negated by its problems.

As for problems, first of all, this album sounds like shit. Maybe this was before they learned to get that extra 7dB out of a CD or something, but seriously, it’s mixed together so compressed and tinny, that I seriously thought I got a defective one when I re-bought this recently. It sounds really bad. I’m sure the mixing is great, and if you listen to the original pressing vinyl or sat in a control room with the masters it would be like Dark Side of the Moon on a uranium disc. But the One Way reissue I have sounds so bad, it’s like you had a cheap tape and the felt thing inside the head part of the shell broke off.

Second, this is a classic example of “too many cooks,” because in every song, Steve Howe tries to totally bogart the sound stage with his weird Asian-sounding (no pun) scales and solos, and every once in a while, Hackett breaks in with his own weird style of noodling. They don’t alternate solos, and they don’t alternate songs; they just collide. I think if it was one or the other of them and just some lackey studio axe that laid down a steady rhythm, this would sound much more straightforward, especially if you’re going for the arenas, which these guys were. I think they spent all of their energy working back and forth against each other, and in the process, the band ended up being a low-quality clone of Asia. The other issue is that these guys basically just bent over and did every single thing their image people told them to do, as far as creating a totally homogenized 80s pop record. Both Hackett and Howe are talented guys, and I think if they would have been at a label that said FUCK MTV and fuck the radio and everything else, just get out those guitars and throw down as many notes as you can on the page in the coolest melody possible, they could have produced a completely kick-ass record. But, that isn’t what happened.

As far as the lyrics, I am not going to completely piss on Max Bacon, because I’m sure he just did what he was told so he wouldn’t get fired. Rumor has it he was so scared the whole thing wouldn’t work, he kept his day job as a milkman during the project. But I can’t not say anything about his delivery, because everything is sung very sweetly, and there’s no real breaks between phrases. I wish I could describe music theory a bit more to explain that, but imagine how someone in church choir would sing “haaaaalleeeeeeeiiiiillluuuuuuiiiiaaaaa” and then how someone in a punk band would sing “FUCK! THE! PIGS!” and compare the difference in phrasing. Maybe I’m thinking about this too much. Actually, I’m still thinking about who the fuck is still a milkman in this century. Do English people drink that god damn much milk?

I might also complain about the bass and drums, but you totally can’t hear them, at least on my CD. So good job, guys. I will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you were playing like motherfuckers and I just couldn’t hear you.

There are a couple of interesting spots on the record. First, Hackett recorded the song “Hackett to Bits,” a guitar solo number, from a solo album. I had that album (Highly Strung) and loved it, so the new version was a treat. The final track, “Imagining,” isn’t bad, either. Otherwise, it’s a pretty mediocre disc, with a couple of the tunes (“The Hunter,” particularly), being really bad.

The band toured for a year after this release and then self-imploded. (Hackett was the first to quit, followed by Mover.) It’s interesting to note that they have a few other music connections that they made as they were in their downward spiral. First, Robert Berry, who was in England working on the 3 album with Carl Palmer, was pulled in to songwrite and cover guitar, although he clashed with Max Bacon and caused more turmoil within the band. Also the drummer’s throne was briefly taken by Nigel Glockler of Saxon. The band recorded part of a second album, which was never officially released. Howe is allegedly sitting on the masters, but the songs appeared on bootlegs and are rumored to be out there on a Japanese release called Nerotrend. Also, derivatives of the songs appeared on the Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman, Howe album.

This is, unfortunately, one of those records that I remember really liking 20 years ago, when I bought up anything that was somehow related to Rush, Genesis, or Yes. I remember my friend Derik being completely mesmerized with this album, learning “When the Heart…” and playing it on drums all the time. For whatever reason, I seriously didn’t hear this album at all for two decades, and got excited when I saw the reissue on CD. Unfortunately, it totally didn’t hold up. It’s too bad, because I still love the old Steve Hackett solo material. Oh well.

Rating: 4

You can divide the history of Rush into different discrete eras - in fact, the band did a good job of this themselves by putting out a live album exactly every four studio albums, wrapping up their career into nice little leather-bound volumes of history that chronicled their change from a Zep Clone band on the Toronto bar circuit to the prog-rock juggernaut they became by the 1980s. But if you had to look at their album output and find the one album that signaled (no pun intended) their high-water mark, the place the trio of long-haired, polyester flare-pant wearing Tolkein lovers switched into a tech rock genre unto themselves, you’d have to say Moving Pictures.

Listening to their eighth? studio album today, almost thirty years later, it’s surprising to me this was produced in an era before digital recording, compact discs, widespread off-the-rack solid-state synths you could buy at the neighborhood Guitar World, and personal computers that could fit in a room and boot up without dimming the entire neighborhood’s lights, let alone fit thousands of MP3s on a tiny hard drive. It astounds me that even Rush’s own albums later in the decade pale in dynamic comparison to this disc. (Listen to this and Power Windows back-to-back; PW is cleaner, but to the point of sterility, with no feel whatsoever in the guitar. It sounds like Lifeson did away with mic’ing the Marshall stacks and fed his guitar through a DI box directly into the mixing board, with no effects whatsoever.) There’s incredible depth, full range, and a complete sonic experience here. It’s the kind of disc you bring to the store when you’re shopping for a new amp or speakers for your car, because you know in three minutes, you can hit every conceivable combination of notes in every type of range, from laid-back noodling to frenetic soloing to groovy prog-rock, with a solid low-end from Geddy Lee’s bass, and a gutsy midrange of Lifeson’s guitars over the top of it. Add to it a crystal-clear drum kit from the professor himself, and you’ve got a seven-song Maxell tape commercial, with everything but the crystal glass to shatter when you turn it up to 11.

This album isn’t about loud, and it isn’t about prog-metalling through every major and minor mode scale at the speed of light to let everyone know you can jerk off with your four or six string as well as they jerk off in their parents’ basements. It’s one of those ‘perfect storm’ moments that the band could record an album with more pop sensibilities than when they were trying to record AOR pop albums that charted, and yet they still managed to write things like the one prog-instrumental track (“YYZ”) that both carved the mold for every prog-rock band that wanted to record a complicated yet jamming instrumental track, as well as instructing a generation of music fans what the IATA three-character airport code for Toronto was. Every drummer that I’ve ever known that could play worth a damn went through a phase where they thought this was the greatest drum album ever recorded, and for good reason. Neil laid down absolutely perfect percussion here, including his innovative use of plywood, which is listed in his musical credits. (How do you play plywood? Wear gloves, hold it by the edges, and hit a metal chair sharply. It’s that bullwhip-meets-shattering-glass sound in “YYZ”.)

One thing that’s firmly gelled in this album is a lyrical sense that examines the 80s more than it examines comic-book scifi and the land of talking trees, magic elves, and twenty-minute epic concept songs. “Limelight” takes an honest look at a life of stardom and the road, in a more sincere way than your typical Motley Crue long-road-ahead-of-us-baby-baby sense of the theme. (It’s also helped by one of the most warm and emotion-piercing feedback-touched solo by Alex Lifeson, one that he claimed was his favorite ever, well after this was released.) “Witch Hunt” and “Red Barchetta” metaphotrically compare future fiction and possible past of Orwellian and MyCarthyist society, something everyone would be whining about in Reagan era new wave pop saturating the MTVs at the same time. Peart output a solid Humanist theme in the album’s lyrics, the kind of thing that works on multiple levels and opens up the band to a wider audience, even if the underlying musicianship of the band is still math-rock odd-meter and blindingly complex instrumentation.

Rush is and always will be a band of the Eighties. Yes, they’ve released many good albums in the nineties and beyond, and there was some pretty solid output in the seventies, too. But with the “one hit” track “Tom Sawyer”, the one song that much of the population equates with the Canadian Trio lands you right to this 1981 classic LP. And most of what I equate with Rush - the synthesizers, the electric drums, the high-tech recordings, the sound of my childhood and when I stopped listening to my parents’ Billy Joel records and started building my own musical identity, this all puts every Rush album as some extension of the Eighties. And if you’re looking at Test for Echo or Caress of Steel, you’re looking at some genetical precursor or successor of that one cornerstone album. Moving Pictures is that fly trapped in amber that will forever be used to carbon-date the crest of this movement in music.

There’s little I can say that’s bad about this album. I can still listen to it from start to finish, which is pretty much rule zero for good album-oriented rock. Maybe if I had to pick nits, I’d say “The Camera Eye” is a little bit repetitive and adds a side two lull that’s slow to pick up until “Witch Hunt” breaks out in its second half. And for the longest time, I held some sort of generic resentment toward the song “Tom Sawyer”, because so many people that didn’t like Rush liked that song, so naturally, I had to not like it, and would skip forward to “Red Barchetta”. But that faded, and not just because in the era of tape, it was such a pain in the ass to fast-forward past a song, and I eventually listened to this one from start to finish every time.

But “Red Barchetta” - perfect driving music. “Vital Signs” is the perfect mellow outro of a bookend for the tail of the album. “YYZ”, probably the greatest instrumental ever, at least in the rock world. The part of “Witch Hunt” that picks up from a slow dredge to a full blowout of rising energy still floors me every time I hear it. There’s so much thickness here, so much perfection, it’s hard to rate any other Rush album as being anything but an inferior product in comparison. It makes me feel old to pull the “they don’t make em like this anymore” shit. And it makes me even older to think about how much this transports me back to my teenage years, how much this album encapsulates the mid-1980s for me, and reminds me of every frustration and carefree moment of my early teens. But I just can’t think of another album that wraps it all up in a nice, seven-song package like this, which is why it easily gets a perfect rating.

Rating: 10

Dream Theater has never been known to show up at a gig, play the songs from the new album, throw in a few old numbers, and call it a night. Similar to Frank Zappa, they’ve always been known for having a large amount of material available to play at shows, and they’re known to mix things up a bit. That includes playing stuff that’s never been on an album before, including songs that will make it to disc in the future, and other bits that are just place-holders, or things that happen live just for the fans. Dream Theater is also a band that listens to fans, both in emails and from the mail that comes in to their fan club.

That’s where this EP came up. The guys were playing out this huge song called “A Change of Seasons,” a piece written for the album Awake, but at twenty-plus minutes, was considered too long by studio execs. Although the song was shelved, the band played it live several times, and it appeared on a few poorly-recorded bootlegs, becoming a thing of legend among DT fans. Tape traders and fan club members built up a fever pitch about the song, and when the band heard, they decided to go into the studio and record it properly for a release to EP.

The song itself is a seven-part, 23-minute epic, which alternates very skilled instrumental parts with actual lyrics which describe a man going through a cycle of life. He goes through innocence, darkness, paradise, blindness, and later wiseness. Most of the lyrics have to do with drummer Mike Portnoy and the loss of his mother. Although singer James LaBrie came onboard for the previous album, this song fits his smooth and operatic lyrics well, and further introduces him to the band. Also new to this CD is the addition of Derek Sherinian on keyboards. I honestly don’t think he did much on this album, and it wasn’t until the next full LP that he became more integrated into the band, but you can hear him here.

Okay, great 23-minute song and all, but this is actually a 57-minute EP, because the next four tracks come from a live set at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club. The band covers Elton John, Deep Purple, and Led Zeppelin in full-sized and fairly serious renditions, showing their influences but taking the guitars up a notch and making things sound much more prog-rock. They finish the album with a ten-minute medley of Pink Floyd, Kansas, Queen, Genesis, Journey, and the Dixie Dregs, all smashed together and played at full speed. It’s funny to hear LaBrie cheeze out a bit on “Lovin’, Touchin’, Squeezin’”, while the band prepares to launch into the next cover in a millisecond.

This was the first time, to me, a band had ever done such an odd little record, and I loved it. Since then, Dream Theater have recorded a shitload of cover tunes, even playing entire albums like Metallica’s Master of Puppets live, and then releasing it on CD. That dilutes things a bit, and it introduces the paradox where bands releasing more and more things to their fans are making it harder and harder to be a fan, because you have to buy truckloads of rare CDs. But in 1995, when this came out, it really hit the spot, giving me something to play over and over until their next album came out. The cover songs are not infinitely replayable, but I still do like the title track, and love that a band could come out with an EP like this, instead of just recording a bunch of reworked B-sides and scattering them across all of their Japanese CD-singles.

Rating: 8

This oddly-titled release is often bemoaned as being too “alternative” or “grunge” by many fair-weathered fans of the band, which is a pretty inaccurate comparison. This came at a time when many bands were cutting their long hair and trying to move out of the strictly-defined world of metal to survive, and bands from Metallica to Tori Amos were being called “grunge” or “like Soundgarden” by disgruntled purists. The funny thing is that this album was recorded in Nashville, and probably owes more to country, or at least the new alt-country sound of the era. And it’s also produced by Peter Collins, who desked Queensryche’s two most popular albums (Operation: Mindcrime and Empire) and is more of a direct connection to the band’s metal background than anything else.

One thing is true about this album: it was the last studio album to be recorded by the original lineup of the band; Chris DeGarmo split after this release. (Yes, I know he came back later, but that’s not really the same.) It’s pretty clear that there were differences within the band as this album came together, and its failure to be another Empire was probably just the gasoline dashed on the fire.

This isn’t a pseudo-concept album like Promised Land, and it isn’t aimed at that kind of niche listener, either. It starts out with the slightly metal single “Sign of the Times,” and the album proceeds to trade off writing credits between singer Geoff Tate and guitarist Chris DeGarmo. The DeGarmo tracks are much more laid back and almost border on the kind of stuff you could see on the Country Music TV channel. Tate trades off with more socially-aware tracks like “spOOL,” which features lyrics like “Focus on a strategy to / open up our minds and then, / together… turn another turn.” It sounds like something Jefferson Airplane, but it rocks out well.

It’s worth noting to those who are interested in this (usually inept metal purists stuck in the past) - Geoff Tate can’t sing anymore, or at least he can’t sing the crazy operatic stuff. He’s slowly lowered his ability to do this, a pack or two a day. To be fair, he can sing, and he does it well, but he’s not going to do any of those breaking-glass shrieking howls anymore. And for the most part, that stuff’s been written out. “spOOL” is a good example of how he really tries to reach his old limits, but he can barely make it.

I’d hate to hear that song live at the end of a tour. (In fact ,they didn’t play this song live on this tour, although Tate did play it later when he was touring for his solo album.) The good news is that on this album, he has really started to write his stuff in a slightly lower register, and his voice still has a great tone to it. But if you’re one of those “god damn it, he hit that high note 20 years ago, what the fuck” people, I don’t know what to tell you.

And I should give an obligatory mention to the one song that’s sung by Chris DeGarmo and not Tate. It’s “All I Want,” and it’s truly horrifying. It’s like the bad b-side to an Oasis single, and it’s in your best interest to program your CD player accordingly, or remove it from your iTunes playlist. The only thing interesting about this song is that I’m sure it came to be because of a major inter-band argument, and I could imagine DeGarmo pouting “I want to sing one song or I’m going to quit!” and then locking himself in a bathroom for four hours.

Going back to this album, it really reminds me of 1997 in a lot of ways. I mean, I did listen to it constantly back then, (except for that “All I Want” song) and it’s just such a pleasant little mix of metal and a slightly more contemporary blend of pop. It came at a time when the whole grunge thing was long dead, but when metal was also completely slain by this alt-rock beast (or not). I remember at that time really stretching to find something new to listen to, because I was getting bored of just re-buying old metal albums, and I wasn’t about to cash in to the electronica craze or the Smashing Pumpkins or whatever the hell was going on at that moment. And for me, this album just sounded RIGHT. It was smooth, it wasn’t just a metallic collection of screaming solos, it had substance, but it wasn’t a giant rock opera or some pretentious format that would make me only listen to it twice a year. It was intensely enjoyable, and had unlimited repeat playability.

And of course, it was the last album before the group fell apart, and that’s my typical luck. In other bad luck, EMI, the band’s label, went bankrupt during the tour for this album.  The band financed the rest of the tour themselves, but I’m sure the financial strain and lack of label support for the album didn’t help tensions in the band.  (It also guaranteed a worthless box set and “best-of” album to get out of contractual obligations once the label was bought out of bankruptcy later.)

But despite the fact that everyone thought this album was “Queensryche meets Soundgarden” or some insipid nonsense like that, I really do enjoy this record, and I still do, over a decade later.

Rating: 9