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What is this album? The quick and the blunt:
Jordan Rudess having thrilling auditory sex with his Kurzweil
for 63 minutes. Your progressive rock loving soul will be
chafed for life, and no amount of Valtrex will help the
open sores that will be left in the wake of your intimate
exposure to his new album.
I loved it. Buy it. Buy it for Jordan. Buy
it for John Petrucci, Steve Morse, Greg Bissonette, Terry
Bozzio, and the rest of an impressive lineup of guests.
Mr. Rudess has once again delivered a message to us all...
He is the God of Prog Keys. And a damn fine songwriter,
too... which comes as a surprise to those who only know
his writing from the little Dream Theater solo circus acts
he occasionally performs live with a comparatively cheesy
sequencer backdrop.
Low points are over with early. Track 2, "Dreaming
In Titanium," is an eleven minute hurricane, but it
starts out a bit heavy-handed (haw!) with an unapologetically
Tesh-ific Olympic opening ceremony overture. Still, it pays
off with a 300 mile-per-hour upward spiral in the last thirty
seconds. So even the low points eventually astound.
To the storm of Track 2, Track 3 is a dubious
eye. A nice, soft little soundscape, but with a bit of solo
ruination toward the end. Sherinian does this a lot, too...
take a perfectly good atmosphere and pee all over it with
a 3-billion-note would-be "signature solo," using
the same old sound they always use.
But Jordan's got world-class CLASS, and I
almost wonder if Magna Carta encouraged him to "put
in more solos" to appease his fans. A lot of stuffy
types tout Jordan's best strengths being of or pertaining
to classical piano (and there are a slew of great piano
moments herein), but this site isn't called the House of
Mozart, and you're probably at least equally interested
in the "balls and chunk" aspect. Keyboard-themed
albums that can deliver that at all, let alone successfully,
are rare, and this album is very, very rare.
It's interesting to note that with so many
of the guitar legends' solo outings experimenting with techno
(Morse and Satriani, et al), it is almost conspicuously
missing in this, of all things, a KEYBOARDIST'S solo album.
Make no mistake, this progger is not interested in making
club-worthy synth music, and not even in using a floor-thumping
backbone every so often. I'm a prog keyboard player myself,
and on my albums I'll break into a steady 4/4 every so often
to give the listener's brain a break, and let him use his
head for banging instead of thinking. Jordan doesn't kowtow
to that kind of baseness, ever. His circus doesn't have
clowns or animals; it's all dedicated to the freakshow.
Another notable hole is the absence of Rod
Morgenstein on skins... not one track. Clearly, Jordan wanted
to make this album a departure from his Rudess/Morgenstein
project of days gone by.
Bottom line. As much as I love Derek Sherinian's
Planet X, this disc takes everything Derek wanted
to do and centuplicated it. But we already knew who kicks
whose ass here... it was never a contest.
Shred Pick: "Crack The Meter"
Reviewed by David
C. Lovelace
Order
Jordan Rudess - Feeding The Wheel from
Order
Jordan Rudess - Feeding The Wheel from
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