Label: Inside Out Records
Year of release: 2016
Production: Fates Warning
Album length: 52.47
Genre: Progressive Metal
Fates Warning are today considered one of the most respected names in progressive metal. The band, going strong without a break since 1982, has served up the follow-up to “Darkness in the Different Light” three years after that album came out: their 12th studio album overall, “Theories of Flight”.
The previous album already made it plain why a solid nine years had to pass between it and its predecessor “FWX” (2004). With “Darkness in the Different Light”, which is without a doubt an excellent record, Fates Warning went back to the days of “No Exit”, “Parallels” and “Perfect Simmetry”, both in sound and in songwriting. They hadn’t hit this hard and heavy in the decibel department since “Inside Out”. You won’t find any sonic experiments with electronic sounds or similar attempts at a trendy “modernization” of the sound on the new album. “Theories of Flight” digs deeper into the musical direction of its predecessor, nurtures it and, most importantly, builds on it. The new lineup (even though Frank Aresti officially left the band before the album came out) has found its songwriting calibration and a superb artistic feel for placing and sensing ideas.
What does that mean? That guitarist Jim Matheos, the only original (and founding) member of the current Fates Warning lineup, as well as its boss and mastermind, hasn’t been this inspired as a songwriter, or this creatively “sharpened”, in a long time, not like these last few years. The excellent “Darkness in the Different Light”, for all its obvious strengths, still held a few small reserves back, and “Theories of Flight” taps into them and fills the artistic gaps in full-blooded fashion. Especially when it comes to getting an even more effective musical payoff inside the songs themselves, and in turn building even more gripping moods and atmospheres.
Ray Alder sings superbly, like in the best of times, and you can feel his voice is working like a charm again, which the previous album had already hinted at. But Alder’s vocals are put to even more musical use compared to the predecessor. The new album trades brilliantly in complexity and melodic catchiness, walking the middle line between those two elements with incredible skill. Like very few Fates Warning albums in their whole career. It’s hard to believe a band can still pull this off on its twelfth studio album, but here we are! It’s packed with a series of memorable choruses which, with their singability and thick, dark-tinged production, often steal the spotlight on the record. Fates Warning are crafty masters of building up moods that slowly creep towards a crescendo, usually right in those melodic chorus hooks. Two songs run over ten minutes, and these two mini epic suites are masterpieces of marrying complexity with melodic accessibility. In that manner they’re basically little textbooks. Ray Alder contributed deeply personal, confessional lyrics to the songs, delivered with remarkably lived-in feeling and, where it’s called for, with a delicate softness in his vocal approach.
Over the years Fates Warning have become incredibly refined songwriters, who know when to take their foot off the gas pedal of (already proverbial) complexity, which gives the band its eternal progressive-icon badge, and fully devote themselves to building gripping atmospheres, which often end up outweighing every other musical element of the band’s artistic identity. A phenomenal example of that is the closing stretch of the album, with the superb mini epic suite The Ghost of Home, the longest song on the record, adorned with unannounced (unexpected) switches between all sorts of moods. The album gains dramatic momentum right in its final part, and the brilliant closing instrumental (the title track) only reinforces that. Maybe it’s only on this track that the thought of what the versatile Mark Zonder might have brought on drums makes your mouth water, though it’s clear that the “wild” Bobby Jarzombek, especially with the heavier, more destructive metal feel of the new songs and their sharpened riffing, is the right solution for the new Fates Warning.
“Theories of Flight” is the album that caught Fates Warning fans off guard. Not because the band couldn’t have made it, but because nobody could really have expected this kind of artistic masterpiece after 34 long years of holding their own on the scene. Delivering the best you’ve got to your fans even in the fourth decade of your career is (especially compared with the artistic burnout of many of the band’s contemporaries) worthy of all respect. “Theories of Flight” is an outstanding album, if not one of the best of the year, not just in the progressive metal subgenre but across the whole metal genre and, last but not least, rock’n’roll. It will thrill demanding listeners who don’t know the band yet, as well as longtime fans, who got with it exactly what they were looking for from Fates Warning.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
rating: 9.5 / 10
Track list:
1. From the Rooftops (6:52)
2. Seven Stars (5:33)
3. SOS (4:34)
4. The Light and Shade of Things (10:14)
5. White Flag (5:20)
6. Like Stars Our Eyes Have Seen (5:13)
7. The Ghosts of Home (10:31)
8. Theories of Flight (4:00)
Lineup:
Ray Alder – vocals
Jim Matheos – guitar
Joey Vera – bass
Bobby Jarzombek – drums
GUEST MUSICIANS
Frank Aresti – guitar solos on “From The Rooftops” and “White Flag”
Mike Abdow – guitar solo on “White Flag”
