There’s a clear leaning toward the epic on ‘Shattered Lines’, and no shortage of ideas, but the concepts are corny, and as for the execution... so much of this album is cheesier than a hiker’s feet. ‘The Persistence of Memories’ (not so subtly misappropriating a tile from a painting by Salvador Dali) stretches out for a full six and features a guitar solo so pomp-filled that even pink Floyd might have thought twice about it. It’s followed by the eight-minute ‘Bad Dreams’, which has a chugging hard rock guitar, a stadium chorus and lots of 80s synth detailing in incidentals that are spectacularly dated. It’s as though they’re trying to ape The God Machine, but in combining the worst elements of prog and AOR, wind up coming on like Mr Mister, only with keyboard solos that would have Rick Wakeman creaming his pants.
The attempts at lyrical profundity are lamentable, even laughable, in their po-faced pseudo-philosophising and empty abstractions. I mean, what can you really make of a line like ‘Love is only a word for Hate’? How about ‘all this life / that flows immobile / sweet and miserable / still remains’? No? Try ‘Teardrops of time / are falling inside / and slowly, in the still earth / Hands that are stone / guilt I feel / screams at each breathe of me’. Sometimes, the line between magnificently oblique and pseudo-intellectual bollocks isn’t so fine.
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High concept is ok (well, depending on your politic), but really needs to be supported by substance. Behind the Escher-inspired cover art and the elevated stylings of the two three-parters ‘The Mind’s Arabesque’, comprising ‘A Second’, ‘Burning Ashes’ and ‘Ecce Homo’, and ‘The Voyager’ which is composed of ‘Dark Earth’, ‘Deep Air’ and ‘Final Rush’ is a paucity of both musical and lyrical content. It's like walking into an amazing city, only to find that it’s a film set and the buildings are simply plywood facades with nothing behind them.
Similarly, while one may be dazzled by the musicianship and the rapid changes of key and tempo, it all contrives to divert the attention away from the fact they don’t really have any decent tunes, and in their quest for technical perfection, there’s a distinct lack of real atmosphere, too. Ultimately, the technical wizardry counts for next to nothing, with the sum of the parts being little more than a big cringe.
Atto IV Online
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