Intervals
In Time

There's not much to say about this album: played divinely (Aaron Marshall is one of the strongest guitarists of his generation), produced and mixed/mastered excellently (Jordan Valeriote, if I'm not wrong, was already behind the mixer for the first Counterparts album, which I reviewed years ago), a beautiful blend of influences from Djent (the good kind like Periphery, Tesseract, Meshuggah if they can be defined as "Djent") to high-grade instrumental Progressive Rock/Metal (echoes of that "Suspended Animation" by John Petrucci here and there), to Jazz; in short, the album could be defined as a small masterpiece sui generis, alas, despite the quality of their subsequent offerings, never surpassed by its own creator.

But what is the winning part of this album, apart from these premises?

Its being damnably "catchy" and melodic, in a good sense: every riff and passage, no matter how intricate, is easily assimilable and singable, every drum fill is damnably spot-on, the bass, although almost inaudible, does its dirty work in the rhythmic phase and the solos/lead parts in my opinion have absolutely no equal in the genre, so much so as to represent a standard frequently copied and highly emulated by many contemporary bands: "Mata Hari" and "Epiphany," above all, represent two true masterpieces of instrumental Djent, dreamy and jazzy just right with this 7-string powerful as never before and the lead passages so successful they almost make you cry out for a miracle.

An album where compositional taste, excellent technique, and musicality reach peaks never reached again even by the same band, which has nonetheless offered consistently high-quality albums never bending to the market in any way.

Gem.