Time Signature Glass wall...

Genre: progressive (power) metal

Finnish prog-metallers Status Minor are ready with their sophomore full-length in the form of "Ouroboros", following up on 2009's "Dialog".

Stylistically, the Status Minor stay within the world of progressive power metal, like they did on their debut, thus delivering epic and melodic metal music with powerful and memorable sing-along choruses and lush textures. Observing the conventions of progressive metal, Status Minor include keyboards into their instrumentation, which of course helps generate the above-mentioned lushness, but also delivering some spacey keyboard solos to complement the blazing and sweeping technically advanced guitar solos featured on this album.

Progressive but not inaccessible, elements such as odd time signatures do appear, but are pretty well masked by drum figures that are not too quirky, and, of course the many vocal melodies also help make the music accessible (check for instance a track like 'Stain' and the mighty 'Sail Away' which feature a number of clever odd time signatures). While a melodic album, "Ouroboros" does feature a lot of quite heavy riffage, which I applaud (check, for instance, 'Stain' and 'Smile').

In all, I think this is a pretty good album, but I must say that the choice of placing the epic power ballad 'Like a Dream' and the piano ballad 'Confidence and Trust' smack in the middle of the album and right after each other does, although they're both beautiful pieces of music, deflate the energy level somewhat, and it takes a couple of tracks for the album to reach the same intensity after that. Fortunately, the epic closing track 'Sail Away' makes up for any lack of intensity before that - it is simply a massive progressive metal masterpiece and not one of its ten minutes of length is wasted.

I think this is a very good progressive metal album, although it did take me more than just a couple of listens to get into it. Maybe it will click right away with you. In any case, if you like epic power metal and progressive metal, you should definitely give it a listen.