MAGELLAN — Impending Ascension (review)

MAGELLAN — Impending Ascension album cover Album · 1993 · Progressive Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
4.5/5 ·
kluseba
I discovered this record by pure coincidence as I recently walked into my local record store and found this album somewhere hidden in the metal section. I thought that the cover was beautiful and that the songs and their lengths sounded promising to me and I gave this record a try. In the end, this recorded easily delivered more than I expected and offers amazing progressive rock and metal music with a multitude of influences.

In the opening epic killer "Estadium Nacional", you hear that the classic progressive rock bands such as "Yes" and "Genesis" largely influenced this band and this track could easily fit one of those band's best albums back in the seventies. From the beginning on, one realizes that "Magellan" honour their influences and know what good progressive music is. Further in this album, I recognized also a couple of modern influences. This band must have been a major influence for bands such as "Dream Theater", "Ayreon" and even "Tool". What pushes this band above the other ones is the fact that the sound of this record is much warmer and easier to follow than the sound of the mentioned progressive metal bands. In fact, the mixture between classic progressive rock and more recent progressive metal is almost equally divided on this great record that grows more and more on me with a slight advantage for the progressive rock touches.

This album impressed me so much that I paid around twenty-five bucks for it and decided to discover the other records of the band. Calm piano and keyboard passages like in the beginning of "Waterfront Weirdos" are mixed with epic and yet commercial progressive rock passages like the middle passages of "Estadium Nacional", modern and atmospheric passages like the opening of "Virtual Reality", hectic classic progressive rock passages like in the beginning of "Storms And Mutiny" and harder metal passages like in the closing progressive banger "Under The Wire". The songs all have a great and coherent flow but there still many details to get discovered. I prefer not to point out any particular song as the album works very well as a whole and all songs have something interesting to deliver no matter if they have a length of less than two or more than eleven minutes. Just take your earphones, lay down and discover this brilliant album.

This album is a truly addicting drug and should be in the collection of anybody that likes either progressive rock or progressive metal music. This highly diversified and energetic album is my discovery of the year until now and helps me to get more and more addicted to progressive music in general. I would even recommend this album to anybody that isn't too much into progressive stuff yet and wants to get a first high quality overview as this album could be the beginning of a voyage of the grandest kind.
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