METAMORPHOSIS: I'm Not A Hero (PROGRESSIVE ROCK): review / opinion to read on Music Waves

Five years after "The Turning Point", Jean-Pierre Schenk is back with Metamorphosis, in a version reduced for the occasion to a trio, the head of the band taking again place behind the keyboards. For those who would not know the universe of the Swiss formation born at the beginning of this millennium, the prefix neo (sometimes hated by some) is to be added to the progressive genre to characterize a music carried by layers of keyboards filling a good part of the sound space.

That's it for the main lines, now let's go to the details of "I'm not a Hero" which opens with 'Dark World' in a dark and worrying atmosphere. From the beginning, the luminous guitar of Olivier Guénat comes to push the melody which rises slowly in power in a repetitive way until its denouement pushed by majestic choirs. The following track would not have been out of place on Millenium's album "Vocanda", with a striking similarity in the voice and the same approximation in some high pitched passages. With a deep bass and an always mid-tempo rhythm using syncopations, Jean-Pierre Schenk unfolds this track before leaving the place to a synthesizer solo followed by a guitar one in the second part. Nothing but very classical, and it is besides what is going to mark the continuation of the album, the interest of the listener waning as the different tracks are linked.

If the feeling proposed in the various guitar soli is undeniable and will tear off some small shivers, the absence of rhythmic variety and of atmosphere of the keyboards ends up making the compositions similar the ones to the others. And it is not the relative aggressiveness of the guitars marking 'So Now What' which will come to compensate this general impression, especially as some passages end up going in circles, notably the instrumental 'When Life Start Again'.

The final song uses more or less the same recipes, and if we can appreciate again the inspired bass playing of Olivier Guénat as well as his guitaristic projections on 'So Hard's the Road', the fade out closing comes to symbolize this impression of vaporous musical ether in which Metamorphosis is stuck, without managing to modify the contours to regenerate the interest. "I'm not a Hero" remains a classic production of neo-progressive rock, with certainly its qualities, but its lack of variety risks to make it quickly disappear from the playlists of the amateurs of the genre. - Official website

METAMORPHOSIS

I'M NOT A HERO

PROGRESSIVE PROMOTION

PROGRESSIVE ROCK