I have people come up to me and say things like, "you gotta check out this band man, it's got all this awesome off-time stuff in it." I don't mind a bit of technicality and off-time stuff (Death, Meshuggah) but this band takes it to the extreme and to the point that the album is to hard to listen to. None of the songs flow like they should and the whole album seems like each band member just wants to outdo everyone else.

Every review that I have seen for this album has praised it as being ground breaking and that it influenced a lot of bands nowadays (Chuck Schuldiner [RIP] was a big fan apparently), and I can see that it was the beginning of the progressive/technical metal genre but I can't say I think much of it. If you’re into progressive/technical metal then give this a spin but it just didn't do it for me.

Now that being said, The players obviously have a lot of talent on their instruments. Within the first 55 seconds of this album, the song had had about 3 time changes and about 15 off time fills and I had a pretty fair idea of what the album was going to be like. As an album in itself I don't really like it but as a progressive metal album, it's obviously ground-breaking in its own right.

As for the singing, typical high pitch screams and some nice melodies and he even manages to sing off-time. Production of the album is fairly good but personally, I don't like the sound of the drummers toms and the bass drum is almost inaudible.

It was difficult for me to review this because I had to try to be unbiased. I didn't like it but thats not to say its not a good album. My final word is that if you like progressive/technical metal then you'll probably love this but I just couldn't get into it.