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›Dominici - 03 - A Trilogy
Progressive metal, a genre generally synonymous with excessive guitar widdleing, jazz breaks, musical snobbery and concepts far removed from reality, tends to fall into two categories; the intelligent, or the pseudo-intelligent. Unfortunately, this release falls into the latter.
“O3 A Trilogy – Part 3”, is the 3rd album in a concept trilogy (really?!?!?) by Dominici, the current day job of Charlie Dominici, formerly of Dream Theatre. The plot of the entire trilogy is something to do with terrorists sent by supernatural entities blowing up the entire world, and one man being left having to repopulate the world with the help of some other supernatural beings…or something…yes, its that bad. The lyrics are no less enlightening, invoking the usual Sodom and Gomorrah “was it our fault all along” type stuff. The main character is even called “Anthony Dam” or “A. Dam”, just to draw more attention to the biblical comparisons, which by the way Charlie, does not increase your literary relevance. No idea why the trilogy is called O3, as I am yet to notice any mention of the molecular form of the compound Ozone.
The album actually begins reasonably well on the first track “King of Terror”, with dark ambience combined with static news reports chillingly detailing a nuclear strike into a gentle acoustic melody, before quite an exhilarating onslaught of pounding drums and melodic yet still definitely heavy drums and keyboard. The remainder of the opener plays host to some great epic vocal work, as well as some notable guitar/keyboard harmonies and play-offs.
The rest of the album, sadly, just merges into a blob of everything wrong with prog metal, unnecessary guitar solos round every bend, forced irregular time signatures, time changes that gut any previous sense of flow, and storybook lyrics floating indecisively above the rest of the band. All of this being done with a disturbing lack of “tongue in cheek”. If you are going to write a concept album, a cliché in itself, and then make it about something so fantastically ridiculous, you are running the risk of being Manowar unless you pull it off with a decent sense of humour (see Devin Townsend’s “Ziltoid the Omniscient”). This is even worse than “Seventh Son of a Seventh Son”. Prog metal should be about defying musical preconceptions and exploring new avenues of creativity, not just being a second rate Dream Theatre.
4/10
Joe Butler