Album review: AFTER LAPSE – Face The Storm

Frontiers [Release date : 09.12.22]

Debut album from Prog Rock classicists, After Lapse.

As any aficionado will tell you, Progrock bands need more time than others to tell their story. Credit to After Lapse for holding track lengths to around 5 minutes. Sometimes slightly less, other times slightly more.

The band, hailing from Spain, are another one of Frontiers’ European signings. And Al DeV gets nowhere near it.

The really great thing about this band’s lean, mean, yet ambitious progressive rock, is that it is exciting, electrifying fare, as tight as Mike Portnoy’s drum.

They manage to cram a lot of prog into the shorter than industry standard track lengths, but none of it is too hot to handle, and it means their compositional and lyrical choices need to be both vital and long lasting, and they are.

‘Thrive’ and ‘Facta Non verbal’ are all of the above. Technical brilliance has the bad habit of sucking the warmth out of a song, but in these cases a myriad instrumental and lyrical passages merge and separate in the heat of a moment.

Vast sonic panoramas pepper the music. ‘Where No One Cares’ navigates through several time changes to reach a huge melodic chorus. And in the case of ‘Come Undone’ the band skillfully place a power metal chorus inside a symphonic rock landscape.

But it is the utterly compelling title track that is all these things and more.

By compressing a taut, high pressure production into 4 plus minutes, they make the whole experience of softly lit guitars, pulsating bass, epic keyboard swells and vocal acrobatics into a user friendly, Play It Again Sam experience.

A band to watch. ****1/2

Review by Brian McGowan

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