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Although you can find a line-up for a band on the website of
Aethellis, Ellsworth Hall played everything himself on this album.
And the result isn’t bad at all. He’s very good on keyboards and
guitar, without ever exaggerating. Don’t expect any speed records
but just soft, pleasant sounds that fit well together. His piano
playing has a ‘Bruce Hornsby’ influence that I quite like a lot.
The bio mentions neo-progressive as genre, but I don’t agree at all.
It’s much more in the vein of The Alan Parsons Project and the music
definitely has an eighties sound.
According to his site, the album and certainly the song “Hubris” are
quite popular on the Internet. For example, the song remained in the
Progressive Rock Top Ten for six months. (I don’t have a clue how
important this chart is) He isn’t a top vocalist, but his voice is
acceptable. It’s a bit soft, but he knows what his voice is capable
of and he remains within these limits.
It’s a pity, he didn’t use a real drummer, because the ‘digi-drums”
are the only real negative element on this album. They are very well
programmed and sometimes you even forget about them, but on other
tracks they really bother me. Especially the breaks in the
instrumental “Djibouti” are very digital.
I
especially like the long final track “Final Affinity”, which
contains a lot of variation and a lot of excellent keyboard (brass,
church organ, Hammond,...) and guitar pieces. But I consider the
rest of the songs as good second best favourites. The somewhat
‘jazzy’ instrumental ‘Djibouti” certainly deserves to be mentioned
too.
A
lot of soft drinks have a light version. They taste a bit different,
they don’t really match the original but you get used to them. I
would call Aethellis ‘Alan Parsons Project-Light’. They have created
a sound of their own. It doesn’t match the original and you get used
to it. And as there’s no more new Alan Parsons Project material
available, this is a very good replacement.
(There are samples of every track on
www.aethellis.com and if you subscribe to their newsletter, you
can download two extra tracks that aren’t on the album.) |
