Wow, early stream. Listening now.

i like the album cover.

Their last album had a spiffy cover too.

pretty weird album... some really awesome parts (some even better than HU), some of it is ok and some of it is goddamn awful. The new clean vocalist needs to learn to arrange his verse singing better (or the songwriters) cos most of it is placed really badly and ends up sounding horrible. Still it feels like they rushed the album, if they toured longer and/or spent more time writing this could have been amazing, cos 3 of the songs were awesome and the rest either were ok or had a mis-match of really great and really awful parts. Probs a 3-3.5.

oh and alot of the solos sound like a wankfest whereas HU even though it was technical, it worked well off the songs emotion. But alot of the solos just sounded techincal for the sake of it and i dont usually complain about that sort of stuff like some dream theater haters do.

i dunno Hollier, the way you describe it sounds like a 2.5. but i'll def listen.

dont be fooled, alot of the songs have 4.5/5 parts to it as well as 1/1.5, i put it as 3-3.5 because 3 of the songs are awesome, the growls and the clean choruses are solid and they're are some amazing parts, you just gotta wait for them mostly unfortunately opening songs the best in my opinion.

idk, probs to them for writing under pressure to be honest. Even if they did take a little bit more
time over it, it would probably just sound exactly like it does at the moment.

See id disagree because the 3 songs which are really 4.5/ 5 worthy have amazing clean verses as well as choruses and the solos are generally the best in those songs, but i can understand why u would say that and i could see alot of ppl agreeing with u on this one.

HOLY CRAP 5/5

The Iconoclast is actually one of the weaker tracks IMO. My favorites are Ascension Chamber, Mechanical Soul Cybernetics and A Parenthesis in Eternity. I definitely disagree with everything you say Hollier. It doesn't feel rushed at all.

the entire label workforce related to this album can take a well deserved pat on the back now. it didn't leak, and the band released it for listening when they felt like it and not when some random dude with a promo copy decided to do it for them. unheard of in the current world? ;)

I'll check this out very soon. Probably won't be as good as Holographic Universe was though.

A pretty awesome album. 'Mechanical Soul Cybernetics' is probably my favorite together with 'The Parenthesis in Eternity'. But Sculptor Void is great as well.

It's not terrible, it's pretty good, though a bit stale and tedious at times.

So far it's pretty good, though I agree that they rushed it.

the leads are amazing, everything else is average.