Metal Reviews

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I think this album was rushed. The individual performance of each member is still great and there are some excellent songs (Smoke and Mirrors, In the Dragon's Den, Orion-The Hunter) but like the reviewer said it mostly sounds like leftovers from Divine Wings. The band should have taken more time with this album. Not bad, not great either. 70/100

It was effectively rushed, I remember reading interviews from Michael Romeo saying it was released early and incomplete due to pressure from their then-Japanese label. It's also shorter than the usual SyX album as one song is missing from it. That might explain why he looks extremely pissed off in band picture in the booklet

Symphony X were among the first metal bands I heard too, so it's still a great album to me, especially the first two tracks. However for me V and Divine Wings are "undethronable".

I went to get this album after I got V, and I was looking for more from Symphony X. I found the album to be good, but not close to V.
And I agree that through the looking glass is kind of a boring epic.

This album rocks! Not DWOT class but close. The second best Symphony X album in my books 90/100.

I guess I'm the minority here- I like this album better than Divine Wings. Smoke and Mirrors, Church of the Machine, Through the Looking Glass, Orion... All among my favourite Symphony X songs.

Yes I agree these songs are great, I especially like The Church of the Machine.

I like this one, some really good performaces on here always loved the start of "In The Dragon's Den", Thomas Walling did a great job filling in on drums.

Apart from the debut, there isn't really a Symph X album where the performances AREN'T great. It's the overall quality of the majority of the songs on this one that I think is lacking.

Granted, I do think this was a rushed effort, and I remember reading interviews where Romeo said there was supposed to be a longer epic called "Twilight in Olympus" but they didn't finish it and wound up using a lot of it for V. If the epic was to be the quality of V, this album would've been much much better

Pinella played all the key solos with one hand on this one! His other hand was broken or something like that.

Pinella is super under-rated as a keyboard player, at least as far as I know. He's way better than, say, Jordan Rudess, but Rudess gets a solo spot at every Dream Theater show while Symph X have turned Pinella's keys down in the live mix considerably the last few times I saw them.