Fates Warning
Theories of Flight

The Fates Warning deliver their twelfth studio work two years after the good "Darkness in a Different Light". The long silent period post "FWX", also due to various side projects of the band members, seems to be definitively overcome, and the Connecticut group tries to certify this with their second album in four years.

The new "Theories of Flight" possesses all the characteristics of the band's trademark: a classic progressive metal without keyboard incursions, constantly searching for melody and with the considerable possibility of relying on Ray Alder's vocals. Accompanying this is the usual technical and performance precision of the musicians, who, far from hyper-soloing and instrumental tedium, have always demonstrated great wisdom in constructing sounds and vocal lines, setting aside those long instrumental escapes that the genre's adherents so love/hate.

Expecting variations on the theme was asking too much, and indeed the five stick to their positions. The opener "From the Rooftops" follows in the classic FW style, between melody, a melancholic undercurrent, and the powerful riffs of the Matheos/Aresti duo. It's stuff we expected as such, but it's impeccably well-crafted in every aspect. Some incursions into the granite power/epic of their beginnings still make an appearance, as in "SOS" and the Maiden-esque "Seven Stars", with a refrain that flirts with a "catchy" approach. The most successful song in terms of structure is "White Flag", mighty prog/heavy where everything is as it should be, captivating enough to once again reiterate the performance expertise of the band, with Bobby Jarzombek doing his usual outstanding support work behind the drums.

"Theories of Flight" is an extremely compact album, essentially free from smudges and drops in tone, capable of maintaining a songwriting that settles on slower rhythms without becoming boring. Emphasizing the album's sense of stasis is the sonic cleanliness that has become an essential bastion for any new metal release: mind you, listening to the album with headphones allows you to catch the myriad variations present in the work, but this almost obsessive quest for the "lacquer" and those plastic sounds that entirely set aside the genuineness of a genre that now, like all the others, is devoted exclusively to the market. Merchandise like everything else in this world. The excessive emphasis on sound takes its toll on the two suites "The Light and Shade of Things" and "The Ghosts of Home", both played on the alternation between soft phases and progressive explosions. Impeccable and engaging in their tone changes with class and care, but lacking that underlying emotion that was present in albums like "Perfect Symmetry" and "Parallels", just to go back and cite two little gems.

The new release from Fates Warning confirms, as expected, a musical reality that rarely disappoints. Jim Matheos and Ray Alder have written another episode of classic metallic progressive, speaking of choices and decisions, the difficulties of living life, of those changes and mutations that the title also evokes. The result is an album of rare solidity, which will hardly open the horizons of a different audience to a key group for the genre, but which has never managed to escape the label of "cult band" loved by genre critics and a narrow group of supporters.

1. "From the Rooftops" (6:52)
2. "Seven Stars" (5:33)
3. "SOS" (4:34)
4. "The Light and Shade of Things" (10:15)
5. "White Flag" (5:20)
6. "Like Stars Our Eyes Have Seen" (5:13)
7. "The Ghosts of Home" (10:31)
8. "Theories of Flight" (4:00)