OK, so... blame Jed because he asked
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Compared to the 90s material, the vocalists are much more adept in English. But they are given awkward material to work with. Most of the early lyrics were from Alfonso or the two then-vocalists (Francisco Hernandez, Dino Brassea). Now they are all from Rene Vidales, and they often seem out-of-place, as if their potential use in songs was not considered when they were written, and the vocalists are just trying to make it work. Or perhaps he gave them coherent lyrics and they got transformed to fit the song lengths and music Alfonso wrote. I don't know how this sausage was made, just that it tastes funny to me.
Many tracks have a dominant word that you hear over and over, and while it may be poetic license, for me it's distracting. To illustrate the extent of the repetitiveness, "The March" repeats the word 'march' or 'marched' 35 times over 7.5 minutes. The final track is about half instrumental, but manages to work the word 'dredge' in 27 times. For "Black Ashes & Black Boxes" the magic word is 'ashes', for "The Unknown Wise Advice" it's 'power', and so on. Many tracks are quite lyrically dense, too -- it's the verbosity of Fish-era Marillion and the repetition of Magma. And often there is no journey or resolution in the songs; it's more like they repeat verse 1 and chorus 1 until the end. Maybe I just don't get it.
So if you have an album that is stronger musically than lyrically, you hope for a lot of instrumentals. There are three here, and a number of longer instrumental passages in some of the other tracks. Alfonso Vidales can still bring it, but for much of the album he sits back and lets orchestral arrangements take up the place where his keyboards used to be prominent. A lot of the other instrumentation is consistent with where I left off with them (Al-Bandaluz / Mosaique); there's now a violinist as a full member, and the guitar has picked up some prog-metallisms since the 90s, but it's recognizably Cast underneath the orchestral coating. That said, there aren't the kind of "money instrumentals" that Vidales brought to albums like Beyond Reality or Angels & Demons.
The album length is about 75 minutes, and I think it could have been wrapped up tidily in under an hour. Maybe well under.
So in all, pretty mixed feelings at this stage. I would take several of their albums from 1996 through 2003 over this one. I also picked up "Power and Outcome", which I'm a bit worried about now because it's the same lyricist, and "Vida", which is re-recordings of classic tracks, which will be useful for me since I no longer have "A View of Cast"
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(All this said, I am hoping I come around on this, because I like Cast and the album is dedicated to two longtime members... but right now it isn't working for me).
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