Once again Trent Gardner has surpassed himself
in writing and arranging the epic “Raising the mammoth” which consists
of only two (very lengthy) parts : one vocal and one instrumental.
Surrounded by the crop of the current US progressive scene, how wrong can
you get when you get none other than Terry Bozzio behind the drumkit ? How
wrong can you get when the vocal chords of Steve Walsh and James LaBrie
(plus Trent himself) stretch as wide as they can ? What’s wrong when you
enlist John Myung as bassplayer and ask Kerry Livgren, Marty Friedman and
Gary Wehrkamp to be your guitarists ? What’s wrong showing youre sympathy
for the mammoth ? NOTHING ! For the critic however it is not an easy task to describe the 44 individual tracks that make up the whole of the project. It isn’t easy to describe a hefty project like this which has been announced for a long time as being a true masterpiece. James LaBrie’s whispering chorus during ‘Broad decay’ makes me think of Glenn Hughes’ best days with Purple. A step closer to the Dream Theater we got to know and admire with “Six degrees of inner turbulence” is ‘Vertebrates’ sung in unison between James LaBrie and Trent Gardner. Tracks 26 and 27 to me contain a pattern which I surely have heard somewhere before without really putting my finger on it. Whilst the vocal part might not exactly be what one would have expected, no doubt proglovers’ heaven will be all over the place during the instrumental second part subtitled ‘Prog-o-matic’, ‘Gigantipithicus’ with some bombastic, powerful keyboard chords leading the way. However the surprises one would expect are not delivered. No doubt this entire project is a very ambitious
one but I’m afraid the endresult is in no way the masterpiece we were all
expecting. It would have been far better to alternate an instrumental
section with a vocal section over and over again in order to have a better
balance. As it stands it’s as if several musicians didn’t give their
best making “Raising the mammoth” far less interesting than “Age of
impact” as the latter had a wider diversity of music. “Raising the
mammoth” also is not as overwhelming as “Leonardo, the absolte man”.
And if there’s one animal whose sound is ideal to be reproduced by a
trombone it surely is a mammoth ! Sorry Trent ! Reviewed by : John
‘Bo Bo’ Bollenberg |
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