Label: Metal Blade Records
Release date: September 11, 2011
Production: Jim Matheos
Album length: 54.35 min
Genre: Progressive Metal
Rating: 9.0/10
Jim Matheos and John Arch. Fates Warning! Progressive metal! Two “holy” words. American-style! No keyboards! No horde of guest musicians, no pomp, no “sugar”!
Even though we haven’t heard much about John Arch lately, I can say without mincing words that the man still has an incredible vocal range, especially when his voice climbs into the highest registers and stuns you for good, just like it did in the first half of the eighties, when he became part of the Fates Warning legend on the band’s first three cult classics.
At many points the album is directly steeped in Fates Warning, which is perfectly logical. That was the expectation from the start. In fact, the record is even closer to Fates Warning than anyone would have dared to think at first. Matheos wrote three of the songs, Neurothically Wired, Stained Glass Sky and Midnight Serenade, for the upcoming Fates Warning album. Unfortunately, that was at a time when Ray Alder wasn’t available to contribute vocals for them. Matheos had no choice but to turn to Jon Arch for help. The material had a Fates Warning flavor from the get-go, in the phrasing and the compositional arrangements, so much so that no other solution for finding a vocalist could really have been considered. And so the touch of John Arch’s specific, unique vocal approach and timbre pins the color of “Sympathetic Resonace” even more firmly to Fates Warning music. The melodies of the vocal lines are often astonishingly close to the way John worked on the first three Fates Warning albums and tried out most recently on his only solo studio record, “Twist Of Fate” (Matheos contributed the lion’s share to that one). Arch still shows that slightly psychedelic touch in shaping vocal melodies, as one of the main elements that sets even Fates Warning’s own music apart on its own special spot on the musical map.
Luckily, Bobby Jarzombek, the drummer chosen for this album, is cut from a special kind of cloth, and combined with Matheos’s motifs he adds touches to the music that only this drummer’s presence can embody. And there’s another guy who’s a great Fates Warning companion through thick and thin, one you never have to worry about letting Matheos down. That’s bassist Joey Vera, who can read Matheos’s mind, and who of course stays “blindfolded” tight with Jarzombek’s one-of-a-kind, wittily dynamic, explosive and at times (in the demanding transitions) breathtaking drumming. If the first two songs still “rock” us with nods to Fates Warning, and Neurothically Wired in particular gets under your skin with a seductive chorus where Arch squeezes out his melodic maximum, then Stained Glass Sky is the song that’s a textbook example of typical progressive metal musicianship. Besides Fates Warning, parallels sneak in with Dream Theater (up to the Images And Words era), Redemption, Watchtower (oh my!),… and in the shredding passages, with their more classically melodic predictability, even Symphony X. Stained Glass Sky is the first prog metal peak of this album. It keeps developing unpredictably, forged from countless motifs, sudden switches, and the relentless waves of many moods. In short, it sails along at a high dynamic level the whole way, wrapped in a veil of real drama theater. Calm passages blend into hard-hitting, venomously wound metal ones, where a guitar phrase stands out in particular, interlocking with the drum fills like sporadic bursts of crossfire from two machine guns. And Jarzombek is the master of working in double bass drum pedals! His drumming has an extremely powerful effect on the whole, especially in the prominent, witty use of the double bass pedals.
Any Given Day (Stranger Like Me) is the most demanding song in terms of arrangement complexity, and here the band comes within an inch of Dream Theater’s musical superiority. For that reason, this song will probably be the personal favorite of the album for music gourmets. Not only is it as unpredictable as a weather forecast, it also embodies a proper dose of raw metal riff punch that won’t let you catch your breath or relax for even a moment.
Incense And Myth is the most compact of the six songs, where the chorus manages to grab maximum attention over the song’s other structures and, as a release of tension, rounds off this truly dynamic album, full of extraordinary contrasting shifts and superior musicianship.
This is an album tailor-made for all Fates Warning fans, since Matheos sounds so highly inspired in his ideas here, like he hasn’t since the album “Disconected”. You’ll all grab it if you couldn’t care less about keyboards in prog metal, because “Sympathetic Resonance” is living proof of how well prog metal can work without keyboards and sound programming. It belongs in the league of the old-school approach to prog metal. And that brings us right back to the Fates Warning classics. Really. You can feel that this album is a kind of half-brother in the Fates Warning discography. In terms of exploring and expanding its own artistic character, it brings nothing special at all. But that’s hardly important, because both Matheos and Arch, with his famous voice, are the core carriers of Fates Warning’s uniqueness, which this time around has simply been poured into “Sympathetic Resonance”.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Track list:
01. Neurotically Wired
02. Midnight Serenade
03. Stained Glass Sky
04. On the Fence
05. Any Given Day (Strangers Like Me)
06. Incense and Myrrh
Lineup:
John Arch – vocals
Jim Matheos – guitar
Joey Vera – bass guitar
Bobby Jarzombek – drums
Frank Aresti – additional guitar solos
