UMUR "Long Day Good Night" is the 13th full-length studio album by US progressive metal act Fates Warning. The album was released through Metal Blade Records in November 2020. It´s the successor to "Theories Of Flight" from 2016 and features the same four-piece core lineup as the predecessor. Guitarist Frank Aresti is not involved in session work this time around, but Michael Abdow returns to play a couple of guitar solos.

Stylistically the material on "Long Day Good Night" continues the relatively riff heavy but at the same time melodic progressive metal of "Theories Of Flight (2016)". Fates Warning haven´t had a history of releasing the same album twice, but this time it´s close. Maybe they´ve finally locked into a groove because "Theories Of Flight (2016)" also felt very much like the sibling album to "Darkness In A Different Light (2013)". Personally that´s fine by me, because both of the two direct predecessors were high quality progressive metal releases as only Fates Warning make them. To my ears "Long Day Good Night" is like listening to the early 90s mainstream heavy rock/metal oriented Fates Warning releases, but with an added metallic heaviness, providing the music with a more contempoary edge (the same can be said about the more heavy and meaty sound production). The soaring melancholic choruses of the early 90s are in place, but the riffs and the heavy busy drumming still make "Long Day Good Night" quite a different sounding release to the mentioned albums from the 90s.

Although "Long Day Good Night" features both heavy riffs and rhythms it´s overall a very dynamic release, with loads of mellow and more subdued moments too. Again this is nothing unusual for Fates Warning and upon conclusion "Long Day Good Night" is in many ways Fates Warning by numbers. I know that has a very negative ring to it, and that´s partially intentional, because while "Long Day Good Night" is another high quality Fates Warning album and tracks like "The Destination Onward" and the 11:29 minutes long "The Longest Shadow Of The Day" (which opens with a 6 minutes long instrumental section) are strong compositions, there are tracks featured on the album which fall under the filler catagory (the mainstream oriented "Under The Sun" is even a little weak) and at 72:35 minutes of playing time it can be argued that the album is too long for its own good. I would have prefered a 40-50 minutes long playing time with only the sharpest and the most memorable material featured. A 3.5 star (70%) rating is still deserved though.

siLLy puPPy FATES WARNING without a doubt has crafted some of the most daring and forward thinking progressive metal albums as a pioneer in the fledgling musical style that gestated through the 80s but the band’s efforts over its near 40 year existence have been quite patchy with some triumphant highs and some uninspiring lows but overall this band has proved it has the power to reinvent in sound time and time again. Returning to the scene four years after “Theories Of Flight,” FATES WARNING unleashes its 13th studio album LONG DAY GOOD NIGHT with a return to Metal Blade Records after it departed after 2004’s “FWX.”

LONG DAY GOOD NIGHT is a lengthy beast with 13 tracks that clock in at a whopping 72 plus minutes and features the same lineup of stellar musicians since 2013’s “Different In A Different Light.” Despite the four year gap, little has changed in the sound of FATES WARNING and the band finds itself on automatic pilot delivering the classic progressive metal sound that they have become famous for with Ray Alder’s signature vocal style leading the twin guitar attacks and atmospheric time signature changes into familiar territory. The album’s tracks mostly feature standard rock running times with the exception of the opening eight minute “The Destination Onward,” “The Way Home” at almost eight minutes and the 11 minute plus “The Longest Shadow Of The Day.”

As we reach the year 2020 it’s becoming more obvious that some of these classic artists who were so innovative in the past have reached a point where they have literally exhausted the creativity cookie jar as LONG DAY GOOD NIGHT lacks the punch that many of the band’s most innovative albums like “Parallels” or “A Pleasant Shade Of Gray” displayed. FATES WARNING is one of those bands that has been quite good at maintaining an overarching mood for their albums with an uncanny ability to take the sum of the parts of the individual tracks and make them something larger however that is clearly lacking on this 13th release which after a couple listens seems to yield a diminishing return rather quickly.

Musically speaking, the boys are still top notch musicians and although there is nothing inherently bad about LONG DAY GOOD NIGHT as the tracks all display that classic FW prog metal sound in all its extravagant prowess, what seems to be missing from this album is any sort of innovation or new direction and as a matter of fact many of these tracks seem like leftovers from previous sessions that just got strewn together at the last minute. It’s hard to diss a FATES WARNING as they are all worthy of investigation and all display stellar technical workouts that these seasoned musicians exhibit without missing a beat but the fact is that FW has set the bar fairly high for musical perfection and seems to have fallen down the ladder a few rungs in its attempt to stay relevant.

If this album had come out ten years ago it might seem much more dynamic than i find it now. This isn’t a matter of quality matter, it’s a matter of sounding like something that lines up with the here and now and unfortunately LONG DAY GOOD NIGHT which perfectly retreads already conquered musical territories just seems a tad too generic for my liking and the fact that the album sprawls on for over 70 minutes just makes me quite tired by the time it ends as if it’s a chore to sit through rather than feel the desire to revisit. Considering the band plans on touring with the has been band Queensryche in the spring suggests that FATES WARNING may have reached its own expiration date.

For anyone who is content with a stagnation of the creative process and are content to revisit a style of prog metal that is becoming more and more anachronistic each passing year, then this won’t disappoint a bit for my liking i find this album to be business as usual and a bit underwhelming. Still though, we know FW has the knack for reinventing itself time and time again so i won’t exactly write this band off quite yet however after four years i was expecting something a bit more interesting than a simple retread of been here done that. Oh well! 2020 has yielded some other unexpected gems so onto the shelf this goes destined to exist on the forget it and move on file. Oh, and those AOR ballads like “Now Comes The Rain” - ugh.