Artist: Arch / Matheos
Label: Metal Blade Records
Release: 2011
Length: 54:37
Rating: 4/5
What a funny way the world turns. When you can’t record an album with your own band because everyone else is busy, you call up a former member of that very band and make one with them instead. Jim Matheos and John Arch. Fates Warning! Progressive metal… heh, heh, heh, “holy” words. American style! No keyboards! No guests, no pomp, no sugar!
Even though there hasn’t been much word about John Arch lately, I can say without mincing words that the man still has an incredible vocal range. Those falsettos, especially when the voice climbs into the highest registers, floor you for good, just like they 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.
In many places the album is directly steeped in Fates Warning material, which is only logical. That’s what everyone expected from the start. Still, 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, specifically for an upcoming Fates Warning album. Unfortunately, Ray Alder wasn’t available at the time to contribute vocals for them. Matheos had no choice but to turn to Jon Arch for help. So the material smelled like Fates Warning from the get-go, in the phrasing, in the composition of the arrangements, so much so that no other solution in the search for a vocalist could even have been considered. And so the touch of John Arch’s specific, unique vocal approach and tone pins “Sympathetic Resonace” even more firmly to the Fates Warning sound. The melody of the vocal lines is often astonishingly close to the way John worked on the first three Fates Warning albums and tried one last time on his only solo studio release, “Twist Of Fate” (Matheos contributed the lion’s share to that one too). Arch still has that mildly psychedelic touch in shaping vocal melodies, one of the main elements that sets even Fates Warning’s own music apart on a special spot of the musical map.
Luckily, Bobby Jarzombek, the drummer of choice for this album, is cut from a special kind of dough, and combined with Matheos’ motifs he adds peculiarities to the music that only this drummer’s presence can embody. Then there’s another guy who’s a great Fates Warning companion through thick and thin, and there’s no fear he could ever let Matheos down. That’s bassist Joey Vera, who can read Matheos’ 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) breathtakingly brilliant drumming. If the first two songs still “lull” us with nods to Fates Wartning – Neurothically Wired in particular gets under your skin fast with a seriously seductive chorus where Arch squeezes out his melodic maximum – 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 album’s first prog metal peak. It keeps developing unpredictably, forged from countless motifs, sudden switches and the persistent ebb and flow of many moods; in short, it sails along at a high dynamic level the whole way, draped in a veil of real drama theater. Calm passages blend into punchy, venomously wound metal ones, and the guitar phrase stands out in particular, as in its crossfire with the drum transitions it embodies sporadic bursts of real crossfire from two machine guns. And Jarzombek is the master of weaving in double bass drum pedals! His drumming has an extremely powerful effect on the overall sum, especially through the prominent use of witty double bass drum work.
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 the musical superiority of Dream Theater. In that sense, this track will probably be the personal favorite of music gourmets. Not only is it as unpredictable as a weather forecast, it also packs a real dose of raw metal riff punch that won’t let you catch your breath or relax for even a second.
Incense And Myth is the most compact of the six songs, where the chorus manages to grab maximum attention over the rest of the song’s structures and, relieving the tension nicely, rounds off this truly dynamic album full of extraordinary contrasting shifts of superior musicianship.
This is an album tailor-made for all Fates Warning followers, since Matheos sounds highly inspired in his ideas here, like he hasn’t since the “Disconected” album. All of you who couldn’t care less about keyboards in prog metal will grab it, since “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. Only in terms of exploring and expressing its own artistic character, it brings nothing special at all. But that doesn’t even matter, since both Matheos and Arch, with his famous voice, are the basic carriers of the Fates Warning uniqueness, which this time simply gets poured into “Sympathetic Resonance”.
Lineup
John Arch – vocals
Jim Matheos – guitar
Joey Vera – bass
Bobby Jarzombek – drums
Frank Aresti – additional guitar solos
Tracklist
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
