Acute Mind

Acute Mind

Written by: PP on 20/07/2011 04:39:09

Acute Mind are a relatively new progressive rock band from Lublin, Poland, whose self-titled debut album is the next dish on my reviews-menu tonight. They play a relatively unsurprising and unoriginal brand of prog rock littered with all the obvious influences, but yet do it promisingly enough to avoid a generic and boring mess, which is more than can be said about the majority of their peers these days.

As is usual with records like these, there's a strong smell of epic and majestic reeking off all instrumentation and composition, one which recalls Dream Theater in particular, but fortunately we're dealing with people who actually know how to write songs with real structure instead of just cut-and-pasting a gazillion solo parts together which seems to be the trendy thing to do in prog rock these days. A good example is the song "Garden", which evolves from mood-setting intro synths into a ballad, before throwing itself into a power metallish section, and later on into a classic 70s prog rock soloing with hints of Pink Floyd and others in the mix. This song alone makes Acute Mind a candidate for a band to be followed from the mass of like-minded peers saturating the progressive rock market, and then they follow it up with a power-ballad in the form of "Misery", which is both catchy and memorable without sacrificing its distinct progressive rock flavor.

Still, the real question is how does Acute Mind differ from other bands doing this exact thing in the genre? The problem is, they don't. This kind prog rock has been done to death and done better by so many bands, not least their countrymen in Riverside, that it's hard to take a record like "Acute Mind" seriously in the long run. It shows no signs or curiosity to innovate in a genre which has been deemed saturated and unoriginal for the better part of...last two decades or so? That said, like I mentioned earlier in the review, it's still a hell of a lot better than the last, I don't know, dozen or so prog rock albums I've reviewed on this site, and at least one of the bands to recommend in the un-sexiest of genres.

7

Download: Misery, Garden
For the fans of: Dream Theater, Riverside,
Listen: Myspace

Release date 21.02.2011
Electrum Production

Related Items | How we score?
Comments
comments powered by Disqus

Legal

© Copyright MMXXIV Rockfreaks.net.