Search - Echolyn :: Mei

Give this one a chance to grow on you

woburnmusicfan | Woburn, MA United States | 01/03/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"It often takes a few listens for an album to grow on me, but this one set a record. It KEPT growing on me with every listen for about a year, until it became a huge favorite. Echolyn is a prog-rock band out of Pennsylvania that over the last 15 years has gradually gone from having more chops than ideas to being the best hope for the future of prog. "Mei" is a single 50-minute album-length song, in the footsteps of "Thick As a Brick". And much as I love Tull's album, "Mei" is better. The album is full of alternating fast and slow sections, with most musical themes getting reprised somewhere along the way. The fast sections rock harder than anything Echolyn had previously recorded, though not as much as 2005's "The End Is Beautiful". William Barnes continues the great clean, crisp production he provided on 2000's "Cowboy Poems Free." Lyrically, the band's website bills "Mei" as "...a combination of Jack Kerouac's 'On the Road' and Dante Alighieri's 'Inferno'". On "Cowboy Poems", keyboardist Chris Buzby made the decision that he was going to minimize his use of synthesizers in favor of electic piano and organ, and that choice helps to give "Mei" a timeless feel. There is none of the neo-prog excess of earlier albums like "As the World", though Echolyn still loves to change time signatures. "Mei" and "Cowboy Poems Free" are the two best post-1980 progressive rock albums I've heard. By anyone. I own about a thousand albums, and "Mei" is hovering on the fringes of my all-time Top 10.



(1=poor 2=mediocre 3=pretty good 4=very good 5=phenomenal)

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