Well, this took me WAY too long to get out - and I also apparently bungled the publishing process, so I don't think anyone has seen much of it. Gah, one click could have made it all work... In any case, I've got Michael Kiwanuka and Uncommon Nasa/Short Fuze coming up soon, so stay tuned!
It's widely understood that there were four bands who really 'broke' progressive metal towards more mainstream acceptance - well, as mainstream as prog metal gets. I've talked about Dream Theater twice and they probably stand out as my favourites, although I can definitely say that early Queensryche gets up there too. And then there's Tool... look, I'll save that discussion for if they ever actually release another album, I'm not sure I want to deal with the dumpster fire that conversation will be. Then there's the last group, the one that gets mentioned in the same sentence and came up around the same time but never seems to get the same attention or critical acclaim. That group is Fates Warning, a group that for the past few weeks I've been exploring in detail to try and understand why exactly they never get the same attention. And I think there are a number of reasons: they never really had a huge crossover into the mainstream, they weren't active throughout a significant chunk of the 2000s, and they also weren't really as good. I'm not saying the group was bad, but the group definitely suffered through some pretty rough production throughout the 80s that would only start to turn around in earnest by the turn of the decade with Perfect Symmetry and Parallels. And yet from there... it's hard to tell what it is, beyond the unfair comparisons to stronger peers. They wrote good music, but I'm not sure I could point to that standout classic record the same way I could with Operation: Mindcrime or Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes From A Memory. I don't think they were helped by trying to stick with production trends of the time rather than carve out their own route - it definitely dates both Disconnected and FWX as albums, even if I do think Disconnected is probably underrated. In any case, when the band went on hiatus and then came back in 2013 with Darkness In A Different Light, I actually quite liked that record - the band sounded fresh and invigorated, and the writing and production felt as fresh as anyone could have expected. So you can bet when I heard that Theories Of Flight was even better, hailed as one of Fates Warning's best albums, I was excited to dig in, so despite being a week or two late with this review, how did the album turn out?
