PROSPECT

Artist's Website
Contact Artist
Slovenia

Warranties and Disclaimers

"PROSPECT are a young progmetal band from Ljubljana in Slovenia. '#1' is their first self-produced album. PROSPECT play progressive metal with melodic powermetal and heavy progressive rock inclinations. PROSPECT sound fresh and are not walking on common progmetal paths. Sometimes they're using clean guitar sounds and complex arrangements, other times they get real heavy and vocalist Simon Jovanovic changes his vocals regarding to the music from normal to melodic-speed-metal vocals, when it is needed..." - Markus Weis, DURP.com

"This CD was sent to me to review some time ago, and in the time between then and now, I have listened to it off and on. Prospect are a quintet of the usual sort, that being guitar, keys, drums, bass, and vocals. And, in a lot of ways, Prospect are a rather usual sort of hard prog to prog metal band. There are moments where they try something different from the tried and true, but these moments are short lived. Their strongest moment is in the closing track "Prospect"...and ironically enough, it is here where you see that this band does have prospects. It is funky, chunky, rocking, and energetic. As with the rest of the album, the band needs to be a tighter, but there are a plethora of interesting textures at play here. However, one wishes that they were explored with a little more depth.

Although not very pervasive, hints at Queensryche, Dream Theater, and Metallica are felt through out, to a lesser degree the further down the list we go and deeper into the album they go. Mainly, the comparison can be heard in the vocals of Simon Jovanovic. There are sharper edges to this band that also suggest other influences...which means you aren't quite sure what niche of the genre they want to be place, though it isn't really varied enough to call them eclectic. The band or album, I can't tell which, is subtitled Progressive Force. It seems, according to their website that the album's title is #1, this being their debut. Released in 1999, it predates The Beatles similarly monikered release by at least a year.

Overall, there is nothing here other than the closing track that really strikes me, though as I alluded to, there are snippets of sound that are interesting, and some that seem out of place. One such place is during "Whales" where we get a guitar part that, while a good bit of playing, seems incongruous to the rest of the track. What it actually seems like is that the band found some interesting bits of sound, but didn't quite know how or where to use them and so stuck them in as bridges or interludes or whatnot. A guitar phrase in "Seven Voices," seems repeated again in "Concept Of The End." It doesn't seem as it's done provide continuity or linkage, just that they liked a particular sound and used it again. It isn't anything really unique either, at least to my ears, where guitarist Roman Files is running the scale of a particular octave...or part of an octave, actually, as only four notes are played... (tap your fingers on a table from pinky to index over and over again...that's what appears to be doing).

Although they are skilled musicians (good but not great), they seem both too loose and to be limiting themselves. In other words, Files and keyboardist Rok Plestenjak wants to breakout of the middle-ground, but the constraints of their idealized style keeps them from doing so... of course, I really can't know what went on in their minds as they were recording, but this is what the results seem like. Not a band album, but nothing to get worked up about." - Stephanie Sollow, ProgressiveWorld.net