Style: Prog Rock, Prog Metal, Trad Prog (clean vocals)
Recommended for Fans Of: Dream Theater, Fates Warning, Queensryche, Rush
Review by: Ian
Country: The Netherlands
Release date: September 9, 2023
Replete as the modern prog landscape is with bands that offer new and exciting sonic palettes, sometimes I get a nostalgic hankering for that distinctive sound of the ’90s and early 2000s, when bands like Dream Theater were king. Kids these days with their djent chugs and their synthpop choruses don’t know the pleasure of journeying through a fourteen-minute song consisting of seven minutes of some nasally-voiced tenor singing about the inner workings of the human mind and seven minutes of glorious, weedly-weedly solos in increasingly impractical time signatures. People called this music self-indulgent and pretentious, and to be honest they were generally right, but we liked it that way, dammit! Nowadays, though, the pioneers of the genre are aging out, suffering from stagnating creative output and decreased relevance, and there are few newcomers on the scene to take up the banner of that particular sound. If only some band were frozen in cryogenic sleep 25 years ago and thawed out in our present day to pick up right where they left off…
Well, as it turns out, the Dutch duo known as Project: Xanadu come quite close to fitting that bill. Originally founded in the early ’90s as an obscure also-ran in the first wave of progressive metal, they only managed a couple demos’ worth of recorded material before splitting a few years in. But eventually vocalist Arthur van der Meulen and multi-instrumentalist Mirko Pelgrom decided to join back together, resurrect their old tunes, and compile them onto their 2020 debut full-length Reflections of Past Transgressions. Now, three years later, the band has set out to improve upon the rather immature compositions of their youth with an album of all-new material. Have they, against all odds, come up with a record worthy of standing up to the classics?
The answer ends up being… not quite. The band certainly have the right ingredients to make a strong prog record; Pelgrom is clearly a very talented musician, and his solos on both guitar and keyboard deliver satisfactory helpings of that noodly prog goodness of yesteryear. The riffs, for the most part, play with time signatures in a nice, familiar, brain-tickling way, and the bass has a refreshingly strong presence and tone throughout. Van der Meulen, meanwhile, is a genuinely wide-ranging and versatile singer, to the point where I assumed the band had two vocalists on my first listen. His low range in particular is much stronger-sounding than that of your average prog frontman, and as a low-voiced fellow myself I appreciate a singer that isn’t afraid to go deep.
But ingredients mean nothing if the execution is half-baked, and a multitude of misfires both large and small keep Refrained Transgressions from truly taking off. Most immediately glaring is Van der Meulen’s vocal tone, and while having a somewhat polarizing vocalist is par for the course in this line of work, this takes it to the next level. Simply put, though he does indeed have a wide range, not all of it sounds good. His lower notes generally sound alright, though he does often take a rather “yawn-y” approach that ends up sounding like Geoff Tate on Ambien. They’re only truly rough when he tries to force his way to the very bottom of his range and winds up sounding stiff and awkward, such as the first verse of “Doing It Wrong!”. The high notes, though, are a truly mixed bag. Van der Meulen sings them directly out of his nose, an approach that can range from endearing in a sort of retro way to actively cartoonish and off-putting. One particularly egregious yelp around the six-minute mark of “Looking Back” reminded me a bit of later-era Vince Neil butchering “Kickstart My Heart” in a live performance, and if anything you do as a frontman even slightly resembles that travesty, it’s a problem.
The music, too, has its share of flaws- most chiefly, that a lot of it feels like something I’ve heard a dozen times before. To be fair, I didn’t exactly come into this album expecting some paragon of originality, but when Pelgrom seems dead set on populating his keyboard solely with synth patches scavenged from Jordan Rudess’s dumpster, it gets a little distracting. The most obvious cribbing comes in “Spiraling Purity” – whose central riff is so blatantly Tool-inspired that I’m half surprised they didn’t call it “Split” or “Horizontalus” – but even in places like the hard charging guitar and organ riffs of opener “Trust Is Like an Egg” and the appropriately-titled “Nothing New”, I get a nagging sense of deja vu, which is a shame because they’re some of the best musical moments on the album. The choruses and hooks, meanwhile, are often clumsily constructed, with lyrics awkwardly crammed in to fit the time signature or vice versa and chorus melodies that lack in flow or memorability. Combined with the aforementioned originality issues, this leads to a sense that the enjoyable parts of the album are primarily those taken from elsewhere- an album that is good and original but seldom both at once.
I mentioned lyrics earlier, and here we must open up another of Refrained Transgressions‘ many mixed bags. For the most part, the words here aren’t anything worse than the industry standard, though the constant thesaurus abuse throughout the album does give off the impression of a lyricist that thinks he’s much cleverer than he is. The obligatory song about the Meaning of the Universe™, “We Are Here to…” is so pretentious it wraps right back around to being kind of fun, complete with deep, dramatic proclamations of “And the decision is… TO BE!”. This all pales in comparison, though, to “Nine, 9, Nein!”, the album’s biggest lyrical stinker by a long shot. For reasons unknown, van der Meulen decides to cram this song full of strained rhymes and increasingly obnoxious dad-joke puns about numbers that make my normally cringe-resistant soul shrivel up in agony. I usually don’t devote this much time to lyrics, but lines like “Two is bi, she likes it hot” and “Did I co-sine on the wavy line” are enough to drop this entire album’s score, and it doesn’t help that the band’s awkward integration of words and music is present in full force. At least the instrumental section is one of the best on the album, though that may just be because it’s a reprieve from all the nonsense surrounding it.
Still, despite all of my many criticisms, Refrained Transgressions isn’t a terrible album. Originality issues aside, most of the songs here are actually well-constructed from a musical point of view, and with some refinement there’s clearly the makings of a very good traditional prog album in here. This potential is most readily seen on epic closer “Like Sand”, which offers some suitably grandiose-sounding violin melodies and guitar riffs, as well as some of Van der Meulen’s most palatable vocal and lyrical work and, of course, more wonderfully retro solo sections. If these two can learn their lessons and sand away some of their rough edges, maybe they can create a worthy successor to their influences. But for now, I think I’ll just stick to my copy of Images and Words.
Recommended tracks: Trust Is Like an Egg, Spiraling Purity, Like Sand
You may also like: Vanden Plas, Hac San, Knight Area, The Pulse Theory
Final verdict: 5.5/10
Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Facebook
Project: Xanadu is:
– Arthur van der Meulen (vocals)
– Mirko Pelgrom (instruments)
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