Review Summary: An excellent progressive rock album with metal touches, Subconscious contains many brilliant ideas and is only let down from brilliant by a one-dimensional vocalist.
Someone like me enjoying Hourglass seems destined by fate. This Utah progressive band delights in putting out long compositions; their fourth release
Oblivious to the Obvious was my introduction to them, and it contained 10 songs on two CDs nearing 140 minutes in length. Its predecessor
Subconscious contains only five songs totaling over 79 minutes, with two songs exceeding 20 all by themselves. Progressive metal is probably my favorite genre, and epic songs display all the qualities I love about it. Hourglass’ focus on exceedingly lengthy songs allows them to show a certain degree of originality within them, and while lacking in a couple areas, have delivered a worthy release.
The music on
Subconscious is written like progressive metal, but owes somewhat more to classic progressive rock in mood, style and lyrical content. Guitarist Brick Williams and then-keyboardist Eric Robertson (these guys have more ex-members than Gordon Ramsay’s kitchen staff) are responsible for a calm, liquid atmosphere surrounding the music; the keyboards are pushed somewhat to the back and are quite often an ambient element, while clean guitar and small, often rather strange leads drawn from different styles of music are prominent over heavy riffs and technical musicianship. The drumming performance by John Dunston is tastefully restrained, with one markedly original technique: his speedy arms handle quick fills across a variety of small drums and a few cymbals, carefully locked in with Williams’ guitar. Williams and Dunston wrote most of the album’s material and are familiar with the opposite instrument, and their teamwork is the album’s rockbed. Brick remains the band leader, and as a guitar teacher with over 60 students a week, he would be routinely exposed to a wide variety of students and, thus, of styles; though this stylistic experimentation is buried beneath the surface, it still differentiates and sustains them over the extensive running times. Two of the tracks are under five minutes long, with one of them mellow and one quite heavy; the other three are 17, 20 and 32 minutes long!
Mood shifts are not overused, but are still quite numerous with music of such compositional breadth. The 32-minute
Exit Wounds is divided into seven movements describing the enlistment of a soldier and his death in battle, and its varying effects on the two sons, daughter, wife and father he leaves behind; their own outlooks on life, war and their respective futures produce five starkly different musical pictures. The soldier’s older son is anti-war and an atheist, whose anger at having his father stolen forever by war is expressed by a heavier instrumental part; his quite young daughter becomes reclusive, though unable to fully understand the impact of recent events, and is represented by series of innocent yet dark acoustic guitar chords and low-range vocals; both styles converge in movement six,
Widowed, where his wife struggles between her husband’s death and the cause he fought for, between her despair and a seemingly distant God. Many of Brick’s lyrics are simple, but they can hit
quite hard: the daughter’s movement is entitled
Daddy’s Little Girl, though sadly this is no longer true, as she is “just a little girl now…”
Despite heavy emotional content, the lyrics of
Exit Wounds and indeed the whole album are carefully written to point towards hope and faith as a refuge. Another epic piece,
Mists of Darkness carefully unfolds with thin synthesizers, then picks up and expertly builds contrast between electric, clean, nylon and 12-string guitars, while the still, somewhat slurry mid-ranged voice of Cody Walker delivers Brick’s depressive lyrics full of aquatic imagery. It is an inspiring journey through fog, mist, rain and storm towards the shore, quite reminiscent of prog-rock classics and, on the heavier side,
Shadow Gallery.
Hourglass is a band that has grown on me with time, a
long time in some cases, and the flaws with this CD still stick out. Though Walker handles mellower material fine with some great harmonies, when the metallic distortion factor arrives and the lyrics turn more dynamic and exciting, he is simply not up to the task and is the low point of
Subconscious. The bruising
Thread the Needle, about heroin addiction and its fatal consequences, the second movement of
Exit Wounds that describes the soldier’s final battle, and the complex 17-minute opener
The Hammer’s Strike that criticizes the corrupt American judicial system are all somewhat lacking in grit, presence and/or attitude. Walker has performed in musicals and is a decent progressive rock vocalist, but metal is simply not his style; unlike Andy Kuntz of
Vanden Plas, the master of combining progressive metal and musical theater, Cody’s tone of voice doesn’t translate well between the two settings. With the right singer, this could have been near the best prog releases of 2004.
Every Hourglass album has had a different singer, and Michael Turner arrived on
Oblivious to the Obvious to fill in the missing ends of the vocal spectrum. The songs became longer still, with
every track on the first CD over 10 minutes, and the challenges associated with such an undertaking were the band's true test.
Subconscious was a strong creative statement for Hourglass in its own right and is worth your attention musically, but if only Turner was singing on it...
