Artist: Factory of Dreams
Label: Progrock Records
Released: 2009
Length: 69:46
Rating: 2/5
The second studio album from the Factory Of Dreams project doesn’t bring much that’s new compared to the debut “Poles”, released in 2008. The project still rests on two people. The first is Hugo Flores, a Portuguese multi-instrumentalist, who once again played, composed and arranged everything you can imagine on “A Strange Utopia”. The second is Finnish singer Jessica Lehto, who sang everything that could possibly be sung.
Once again we’re dealing with progressive music that pulls in some riff-based prefixes, nudging the whole thing toward prog metal. The arranging is again the problem. It simply feels like Flores is trying to present more than the limits of good taste allow. There’s too much information, or it doesn’t feel connected enough, so the merging of musical ideas and sonic building blocks never reaches a real symbiosis or mutual compatibility. Put plainly: the motifs don’t carry over into each other very well, and the instruments “duke it out” even within the run of a single motif. So the album once again suffers from having no recognizable common thread, no real character and no identity. The arrangements are classic, orchestral in design, and work to crank up the bombast and pomp!
By now you’ve probably figured out that “A Strange Utopia” is a very tough album to listen to, one that demands you give yourself over to it completely. It’s layered and multi-tiered. Fragmented into loads of motifs. The listener often runs into a riff that finally starts making sense, only to have it jump in the next moment into a completely different ambience of musical expression. If that happens too often, you’re facing the fact that the music falls apart motif-wise and loses its real expressive core, unless you want your expressive core to have no character or expression.
You can feel that the album was stitched together artificially. Flores emailed the MP3s to Jessica, she sang the vocal lines and sent the material back to Hugo. The two basic building blocks, vocals and music, don’t hide the fact that they were joined without any real bond, so no proper chemical reaction happens between them.
Dark Utopia is a track, and one of the rare five minutes on the album, where you can pick up a common thread holding the song together. It would be worth suggesting to Flores. that he let his arrangements breathe freely and stop filling every motif with Jessica’s operatic vocals. Many times you also get the feeling that harmonized vocals would suit this music better in places. That is, multi-vocal chants that also carry the right density of warmth from lower-pitched male voices. The Ayreon project pulled that off extremely well across its past catalog. Hugo Flores could learn a lot from listening to Ayreon’s catalog.
The idea behind Factory Of Dreams remains bold, it’s just clumsily presented. Consuming it demands strict focus and concentration on the music. It’s a demanding album that has to spin in your player quite a few times before it gets under your skin. If ever. The main hurdle is Jessica’s vocal. On top of the complex arrangements, she adds a complex operatic vocal stance. That’s why the music often clashes with the lines of the vocal melodies. Sure, the whole thing can be swept under the label “progressive”, “adventurous”, “experimental”, “trying something different”. Take your pick. But even that kind of embalming can’t survive the fact that so many ideas are forced violently together, with no real feel for reaching clear, concise, expressively prominent and melodically rounded-off arrangements. Yes. Even progressive metal has its limit. So the whole thing almost borders on what you’d call chaotic prog metal.
The project has potential and know-how. But in its fragmentation, it won’t find proper closure of expressive definition, let alone a character of its own. Flores doesn’t play jazz, after all, so his expressive range is more limited from the ground up. And he has to take that into account. So he urgently needs to find a different solution in the arranging. Either drop vocals altogether, or bring a different, more compatible way of vocal delivery into his project. “A Strange Utopia” is thus meant for the most “thick-skinned” fans of progressive rock and metal erotica to discover!
Lineup
Jessica Lehto – vocals
Hugo Flores – all instruments
GUEST MUSICIANS:
Gaby Koss – backing vocals on track no. 12.
Antonella – backing vocals on track no. 7.
Zara – backing vocals on tracks no. 3. and 9.
Hugo Flores – backing vocals on tracks no. 1. and 7.
Cherryl Childs – backing vocals on track no. 3
David Ragsdale – violin on tracks no. 3. and 10.
Taoashi Gotto – keyboards on tracks no. 3. 10. and 12.
Shawn Gordon – keyboards on tracks no. 7. and 8.
Chris Brown – guitar on tracks no. 8. and 12.
Production
Hugo Flores
Track list
1. Voyage To Utopia (4:36)
2. The Weight Of The World (5:54)
3. Inner Station (6:18)
4. Sonic Sensations (4:19)
5. The Road Around Saturn (4:21)
6. Garden Of All Seasons (4:21)
7. Dark Utopia (4:50)
8. Vacation In Venus (4:26)
9. Chaotic Order (4:09)
10. Slow Motion World (5:08)
11. Destructible Destruction (5:57)
12. E-Motions (9:32)
13. Broken* (2:23)
14. The Weight Of The World (Radio Edit)* (3:26)
*….bonus tracks
