Style: Progressive Metal, Trad Prog (Mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Dream Theater, Symphony X, Seventh Wonder, Ayreon
Review by: Christopher
Country: US-NY
Release date: 16 June, 2023
Approaching the halfway mark in the year, I begin to reassess what I’ve reviewed and think about how the year is going so far. It’s going badly. At the end of 2022, all but a couple of my top ten albums of the year were underground prog albums that we had reviewed here. So far this year, I’ve got two making up my current top ten. Still, every review has the potential to reveal a new favourite album, right?
Right?
CAGE is the third full-length from New York-based trio Infinite Spectrum. Lead vocalist Will Shaw has contributed some small parts to a couple of Ayreon albums, and taking a leaf out of the Arjen playbook, Shaw is joined by eight guest vocalists on this release in order to tell the story of a detective summoned to investigate a suspicious murder at an insane asylum (I think, bio info was scant in my searches).
“Welcome to the Cage” opens the album in fairly standard trad prog fashion: solid riffs, ok vocals, synthetic orchestra accompaniment, and all topped off by guitar and synth solos that vie for MVP status. The bass is quite audible in the mix too, and pulls off some impressive work. It’s easy to pick out the stand-out moments: the vocoder backing acting as a descant to the harshes on “Faith and Science Collide”, the bass solo on “The Sky Beneath”, the chorus-laden synth solo on “Shapeshifter”, the explosive and frantic opening to “They Walk Among Us”. Closing epic “Conclude the Investigation” may well be the album’s best track, with its charming eighties gloss and a very satisfying riff that swaps bars of 4/4 and 5/4.
However, while they deliver a lot of great moments, these rarely stitch together to form consistently great songs, and they certainly don’t add up to a consistent or great album. Infinite Spectrum have chops, but their revolving door of guest vocalists becomes a liability. CAGE ends up feeling like a collection of unrelated songs totally lacking contiguity. For example, “Far Away” is a pretty standard Dream Theater-style ballad with a lovely vocal performance from Sarah Teets, but it sounds like it belongs to a completely different album; and this becomes more apparent with every successive new vocalist. Infinite Spectrum are trying to sell you on a unified concept as sold by nine different vocalists in a genre full of soundalikes, but their sound is too indistinct to unify their singers. Where Ayreon interweave the performances of a contingent of vocalists, each Infinite Spectrum track features a new singer who we’ll never hear from again. As a result, CAGE just sounds like a playlist of underground trad prog bands on shuffle. Conversely, the flatness of Infinite Spectrum’s sound makes every song sound the same: similar djent-trad riffs, similar vocal melodies, and nearly identical song structures.
The problems begin to compound: the contributions of the guest vocalists are very variable, and those that are weaker stick out like a sore thumb—meanwhile the performances on “Shapeshifter” are solid but oddly muffled in the mix. There are also a handful of instances of voice acting on this album, which I’m not generally keen on. They’re not badly done and they’re actually quite uncommon, but then one would expect more of these to attend to the narrative. The balladeering aspects of “Strangers From the Sky” are dreadfully trite, though in its dynamic mid-section it becomes more engaging, and this is true of much of the album. The aforementioned moments of brilliance are few and far between; the rest of the time, Infinite Spectrum sound like every other modern trad prog band. And on top of all that, there’s sixty-seven minutes of this—CAGE runs a little too long for an album this variable in quality.
No one could deny that Infinite Spectrum are talented performers who make some very solid music, but in a scene blighted by Dream Theater tribute acts it takes an especial effort to stand out from the crowd. CAGE simply doesn’t do enough to stand out, at times leaning too hard on genre cliches, and at other junctures impressing with moments of inspiration that make the problems all the more glaring. Add to this a motley crew of disunited guest vocalists and it seems like Infinite Spectrum really need to break out of the cage they’ve locked themselves in.
Recommended tracks: Welcome to the Cage, Shapeshifter, Conclude the Investigation
You may also like: Max Enix, Sky Passage
Final verdict: 5.5/10
Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Official Website | YouTube | Facebook | Instagram | Metal-Archives Page
Label: Sensory Records – Bandcamp | Official Website
Infinite Spectrum is:
– Alex Repetti (bass)
– Alex Raykin (guitars, backing vocals)
– Will Shaw (vocals)
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