Lynx33 Jordan Rudess has been around for more than 20 years in the prog-scene but I must admit I have always been on the verge of commenting his musical efforts as butteflying between some eclectic-crossover prog, jazz rock-fusion and progressive metal. Sometimes I strongly have the feeling that his true nature manifests itself only in his solo efforts, his deeds often get crossed in DT where the stress falls on metal-in-prog rather than artistic purety. However, while Jordan's professional pianism has never been and never will be demanded nor his technical background knowledge, his solo thingies vary in every sense. Some seem half finished, some seem full or lacking of emotion, some seem to be too much into some amateruish-jazz things, and some seem very far from what great music can be created by simple weaving pianistic sounds together, quirkied, ramified and chromatically structured. While he can realize albums like the two superb ones with R. Morgenstein and LTE, and he is in the position to create almost anything he likes and to get circumvallated by such good musicians like the ones here, he can make such albums like his Christmas cd, Feeding the wheel, Notes on a Dream, which are without any depth, and void in a whole. This album about covering prog-works from the past is quite the same. Only one thing can come everyone's mind putting on this record: Why make things again and again? With Dance on the Volcano, Sound Chase etc. needing no introduction and being piled up with the Pi-thing and the Piano medley, this album still lacks of any originality, simply it turns the originals out of their magfnifying and histrocial skin, adding some jazz touched-improvised-like things into their lines of inside. Tarkus, which is quite a long but good one en originale, is the low tide. As said before, technically is okay, musicians are very shaped, but in vain, it is empty. No more words just two stars.

Lynx33 The album Killers was released in June, 1982. Since then it has become an album that most people see as a useless compilation album by a band that wants to balance the commercial disappointments by their previous albums, trying to bring glory days back. However, I don't see it like that. This album is very special to me, always has been and will always be. I remember those days in the late eighties when I listened to it all the time, I fell asleep to it, I woke up to it, listening to it before and after school. I especially recall those days when I was very sick lying at home reading Alan Dean Foster's adapted book Aliens, listening to Killers meanwhile all the time on cassette, having it taken out and put back if one side was over, playing it again and again non-stop. Very sadly, I have lost the cassette copy I had since then, but the memories the album gave me can never be forgotten. I especially liked the new songs with the unique guitar sound provided by Bob Kulick, brother of the band's future guitarist Bruce Kulick, and the guitarist on Paul Stanley's club tour along with Eric Singer. I liked the old songs too, Love Gun, Cold Gin, Sure Know Something for instance, although I have always much preferred Stanley-Simmons-Carr-Kulick Kiss, I was a big fan of this line up Kiss back in the eighties and nineties. I have never understood why the band didn't release an official live album in the eighties, because they were so good live, as you can see and hear on the lot of bootleg videos and concerts. Eric Carr and Bruce Kulick (though, Bruce is not on this album), in my opinion, were much better musicians than the ones in the classic line up, though in the last fifteen years, it has been so popular to say the old line up is the bestest because they're the originals. The band was very much lucky that they were able to find a superb drummer, Eric Singer, to replace Eric Carr. The album Killers itself in structure and atmosphere has a lot in common with the band's other compilation called Smashes, Thrashes and Hits, which I also had on cassette back in those days liking it too. My favourite song on Killers is I'm Legend Tonight, into which I remember I deleted a two second break accidentally having pushed the record button once. Everytime I hear the album ever since I know where the break was in the song on my old cassette. It's so strange. The other fantastic song is Sure Know Something, of course. So, not to make it too long, this album to me is not a useless compilation at all, though musically much time has passed, but something very special in my memory book, deserving to be given 3.5 stars.