inside out
2007
Paradise Lost
About This Album
Five years after the release of their critically acclaimed Odyssey, New Jersey prog metal quintet Symphony X have taken as their inspiration John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost as a follow-up. The poem, about the fall from grace of Adam and Eve and the rise of Satan's presence as prince of the world, seems like a fitting theme for a heavy metal album, but it's an ambitious one and for a lesser act, would prove to be impossibly daunting. The most immediately apparent thing about the sound of this album is just how Symphony X rethought their musical universe in order to accommodate it by going against natural process and punter's expectations. While the band's sound has been populated with outrageous time signature changes, extrapolated harmonics, and extra textural production elementals -- like large choirs, keyboard sounds as large as the guitar sonics, and utterly orchestral and nearly operatic pretensions -- from the beginning, this recording, whose theme suggests it ripe for such excesses, moves in a sideways if not opposite direction.

That's not to say that those elements are entirely missing -- choirs and orchestrals abound on the intro "Oculus Ex Inferni" and "The Walls of Babylon" and elsewhere, but there is a more direct approach at work here.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4,5,6 and 7)

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