ProgressoR - Detailed Reviews - Event (USA) - 1998

Prologue. Event is a band consisting of four young musicians from Boston who compose and play quite a soft kind of the Progressive Metal. "Electric Skies" is their debut album. (My special 'separate' thanks to Matt Scourfield for sending me it twice - the first copy disappeared or was simply stolen somewhere on its way to me.)

The album.

Ouch... These guys describe the music they perform as an "Innovative Progressive Rock". Already after a few listenings to it I not only doubt such a description, I'd even say, it almost doesn't correspond to reality at all.

To be honest, it is really hard for me to describe each of the songs from the "Electric Skies" album. There is no problem doing it, of course, but, imagining how boring such a review would look with the (boring, boring!) enumeration of songs, the majority of which structurally (stylistically, technically, vocally, etc) are so similar to each other, I can't.

Song after song I hear that Dave Deluco's vocal is not unlike Ray Alder's of Fates Warning: the same intonations, the same vocal range, the same 'dramatism' of singing. The only song I can describe as more or less really original (but notas innovative) is the opening track, Perfect Illusion, the longest piece on this album. All the other songs are quite short, there is very little place for really strong, diverse arrangements within them.

I even dare to say I like synth-flash-chords by Shaun Michaud more than his guitar work. The reason is the same - most of the lead guitar themes sound almost openly a-la Fates Warning in the 90's. Only the rhythm-section works more or less effectively from the beginning to the end of this quite ordinary programme.

As for me personally, I liked (only!) both all-instrumental pieces. They're short yet almost absolutely free from the obvious Fates Warning influences. But of course, these two pieces couldn't be indicators of the musical quality of this work on the whole.

Summary. Well, "Electric Skies"... It is not Neo, but, at the same time, by far not the Classic Progressive Metal I was waiting to hear on this album. This is music that 'placed' somewhere between these two known terms... Just an ordinary set of the more or less decent songs with the traditional (but quite accessible) structures of the Prog-Metal genre. Not bad for the musicians - novices, though. Anyway, I think this is a good debut album, all in all, remembering of how young these musicians are and thinking of their potentials...

VM. April 11, 2000