Style: progressive rock, rock opera, progressive metal, power metal (clean vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Neal Morse, Avantasia, Ayreon, Dream Theater
Country: United States-GA
Release date: 28 June 2024
This review is going to hurt me to write. A disastrous Christian prog rock/metal opera supergroup headed by Marc Centanni on guitars and… Gary Wehrkamp of Shadow Gallery, one of my all time favorite prog metal bands. I won’t be coy: As Heaven’s Metal Magazine puts it, “This is Christian metal’s Les Miserables,” presumably because it’ll make you cut all your hair off and beg for a bloody revolution, or perhaps because it’s as bad as Russell Crowe’s singing1. From one of the worst stories I’ve heard in a prog concept album—and that’s no easy feat—to the insipid Neal Morse and Ayreon worship musically, even Wehrkamp’s composition and performance come nowhere close to the salvation everybody involved so desperately seeks.
The central focus of a concept album is its story, and it’s clear from one quick look at The Crucible’s story that lyricist Centanni has never heard of subtlety in his life, taking cues from The Astonishing’s infamously blunt character names and stale narrative structure. Jude, the Antichrist figure in charge of the giant biotech corporation ichor (the blood of the gods), creates an Edenic city called Babylon for his master-race of tech-infused humans, directly censoring other belief systems. Centanni was so damn close to being self-aware, too, penning the line, “There’s no reasoning for religious creed / Let’s end the cause of all war / We can bring them peace.” Eventually, Jude is chosen to be the god-emperor of the Earth when he saves mankind from… super-meteors? How this biotech mogul stopped super-meteors is anybody’s guess, but the Revelation parallels with the Antichrist aren’t veiled. Centanni, classically self-victimizing the Christians in the modern world, creates a “Christian holocaust” as sung throughout the chorus of the titular “The Crucible.” Jude’s cybernetic assassin “The Messenger” is sent against the Christians who have rallied under the Pope in a genocide against Christianity. Had Centanni read the Bible, he would have known that the prevailing reading of Scripture has the Rapture preceding the tribulation and rise of the Antichrist, so all the true Christians would have, y’know, been rapt. There’s also some side plot with Princess Relena, heir to the exiled Italian royal family since World War II, and she does something (well it feels more like nothing) in the story, but given that this is significantly worse in plot and execution than the goddamn Left Behind series, I won’t get into the story mess any deeper. However, I must mention that the album transitions from a mediocre sci-fi story to aggressive evangelism around the halfway point, shifting tactlessly to preaching the wonders of Christ when it has little to do with the story at hand. The cast of vocalists on The Crucible moan and spaff about Jesus on the second half of the album more than your average Neal Morse album does in its entirety, and that’s no easy feat. I’ve heard Mormons talk about Joseph Smith less than Harpazo sing about Jesus in “Change of Heart Pt. 2.”
That song title’s stupid pretentiousness seems like an obvious segue into discussing how stereotypically prog [derogatory] The Crucible is with its songs all endlessly long, full of instrumental sections that wouldn’t stand out from your average Dream Theater clone, and an uninspired vocal cast that would have been written off over twenty years ago as a poor Ayreon or Avantasia wanna-be. There are occasionally interesting a cappella moments (“Ichor” and “The Book of Life”), yet those feel redundant having heard any of Neal Morse’s seemingly infinite catalog. On the instrumental side, Wehrkamp spent fifteen odd years as one of the best composers in progressive metal throughout the 90s and 00s, but his creative juices have heart-breakingly seem to have run out with Amaran’s Plight’s 2007 album forewarning the cataclysm of Harpazo. The songwriting follows a basic traditional progressive metal pattern of bombastic sections, slow sections (which sound like Ayreon’s 010001 [or whatever numbers, I can’t be arsed to look them up because Harpazo has worn out my enthusiasm for prog] because of the “*oooooh* technology scary and bad” theme), epic choruses, extended solos, you name it; however, there is little finesse or care in the transitions between these sections, and the songs all feel painfully drawn out. The real tribulation of the Christians is sitting through seventy-one minutes of this, with six songs topping eight minutes in addition to a couple filler tracks (“Legion Program,” “We Are Weak”).
I’ve closely followed Wehrkamp’s career as an incredibly accomplished multi-instrumentalist, and his work on The Crucible displays an uncharacteristic lack of emotion with his production, guitars, bass, piano, and drums all rather tepid. The solos lack any depth or resonance, the open chord choruses feel bland and repetitive after the very first in opener “Ichor,” and there are no songwriting tricks to change up the formulaic progressive metal-ness. This is simply uninspired on every front. Several singers have decent performances, particularly DC Cooper (Royal Hunt) as lead character The Messenger, but even for his great performance we have an equally weighted negative from Lee Lemperl as Princess Relena Umberto. For someone who loves Jesus Christ so much, you’d expect her to sing with more passion, yet her performance is monotone with a lack of vibrato, one or two note melodies, and a frustratingly soft tone. Just as her character could be cut from the story with no substantial change, so could her performance.
The Crucible is technically sound enough to not be ranked among the worst progressive metal albums I’ve heard no matter how annoyingly awful the concept and boring instrumentals are. All the instruments and (most of) the vocal performances never miss a beat, and Wehrkamp’s production is warm and tight—the singers are mixed especially well. “Two Witnesses” is my favorite track for the glimpses of Shadow Gallery-isms in its melodies and writing, though those glory days are clearly long past. Yet just three songs later is a prog interlude so grating as to be among my least favorite of all time: “We Are Weak.” With a lullaby singing “Jesus loves me this I know / For the Bible tells me so / Little ones to him belong / They are weak… but he is strong.” In addition to the corny, disgustingly saccharine but slightly creepy lullaby, Wehrkamp tries a totally disjoint-from-the-first-part orchestrated section that is ok though not his best work, a common theme of The Crucible, and then the track ends with an attempt at an epic finale, but the belting of DC Cooper doesn’t work in the lullaby melody, and the track comes crashing down in its attempts at resplendency.
I have never wanted to love an album more and hated it this much. I loveShadow Gallery and have been known to dig a good rock opera on occasion even if they’re a bit cheesy for my current taste, but Harpazo have elevated bad prog and its classic counterpart cheese/cringe to a whole new realm. On first appearance it’s shiny and slick, but the inner flaws almost immediately reveal themselves under a magnifying glass—really just the naked eye. The experience of listening to and writing about this album was its own crucible of sorts: listener beware.
Recommended tracks: Two Witnesses
You may also like: Neal Morse Band, Shadow Gallery, Aggressively Proselytizing, Enzo and the Glory Ensemble, Teramaze, Royal Hunt, Amaran’s Plight, Ben Baruk
Final verdict: 3/10
Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Official Website | Facebook | Instagram
Label: Rockshots Record Label – Facebook | Official Website
Harpazo is:
– Gary Wehrkamp (vocals, guitars, piano, drums, bass)
– DC Cooper (vocals)
– Lee Lemperle (vocals)
– Jennifer Eckhart (vocals)
– Rey Parra (vocals)
– Christian Liljegren (vocals)
– Les Carlson (vocals)
– Michael Drive (vocals)
– Niklas Kahl (drums)
– Mark Zonder (drums)
– Mark Centanni (guitars, drums, keys)
– Stephanie Morykin (violins)
– Gary Bredbenner (trombones)
– etc
- Joke credits to Chris because I sure as hell haven’t endured Les Mis. ↩︎
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