Chronos Zero - Hollowlands

Italian progmetal bad-asses Chronos Zero are back with their really long album titles to rock you hard.Italian prog masters Chronos Zero have returned to bang your head to odd time signatures. After showing their prowess on their impressive debut [deep breath] A Prelude into Emptiness - The Tears Path: Chapter Alpha, the band is back to up the ante with Hollowlands - The Tears Path: Chapter One, and a renovated line-up which includes new vocalists Margherita Leardini and Manuel Guerrieri.

Chapter Alpha had an aggressiveness to it that put it up there with one of my all time favorite progmetal bands, the grandiose but quite ballsy Symphony X. That heavy, menacing bottom end serves as a counterpoint to the mythic - and often overblown - scale of the storylines in your average progmetal outfit. Having lost a dedicated keyboardist in Giuseppe Rinaldi, the guitars and keys are both handled by Enrico Zavatta who fills in nicely. And Enrico clearly has a Michael Romeo distortion pedal cuz that guitarwork is heavy in the best way. Things on Chapter One take the predictable path of building a storyline to a crescendo with bits of rest between such as On The Tears Path, where Margherita takes the spotlight. She's good, make no mistake, though the song gets a bit long at just over five minutes. Metalheads are not a patient breed. but it's overall more killer tunes for the balls and chunk™ crowd

Still, there's an impressive bit of music on this album - especially if you're Symphony X fan. Future albums would not surprise me if they included guest spots with Romeo or Allen, but don't take that to mean that the music can't hold up on its own. This is a band with the talent to take it as far as their ambition allows. We'll be here waiting after all in mosh postition.

The Bottom Line: Fans of progmetal gods like Dream Theater and Symphony X will prolly dig this European take on the genre as Enrico Zavatta and company, armed with some new co-conspirators, take their musical mythologies to the next level.

- Genghis is itching to catch some live progressive metal really soon...