Conor Fynes
'Scrapbook' - TDW (5/10)
Well, that was something.
While I will do my best to speak of the music on this album by this Dutch progressive metal group, there is one thing on this album that stands out beyond anything else, even the music itself. That being the length of the album, which- after having listened to it from start to finish- has left me in a state of relative exhaustion. While I will do my best to critique the music based on its merits, this album has brought up a rather saddening point to me; that an album's length can greatly affect a listener's patience and appreciation of it, regardless of how good or bad the actual music is. In any case, from the two hour length of this record onwards, it is clear that TDW has invested alot of time and effort into this album, and indeed, this sense of effort gets across. While the music is well done and some of the songwriting here is excellent however, it all comes back to the length, and the album's general lack of variety, which leads it to becoming an exercise in tedium, should one attempt to listen to all of it from start to finish.
'Scrapbook' is a two disc album, although it could easily be considered as two albums under one name. Although the style of hard-edged melodic prog metal is kept consistent throughout the album, there is no narrative umbrella to reach over all of these tracks and create some binding concept, as is the case with many prog double albums. Instead, over the course of two hours, we are simply presented song after song of music that these guys have done. The music generally sticks to a slightly progressive formula of prog metal, with the occasional lapse into something different, like Middle-Eastern music, or symphonic metal, you name it. While none of the styles here (including the main sound of the band) is done particularly well, everything sounds solid, and there are even moments here where the listener's attention is grabbed. Of the two hours of material here though, there's probably an hour and fifteen minutes of music that I would consider to be very good, with the other forty five being something of a nuisance. It is not necessarily that TDW is inconsistent with their writing, but some of these songs could have used a little editing, to get the message across a little better.
The songwriting and performance here is very good, but I do not believe that the style that the band is playing is fresh or powerful enough to stay that way over the course of two hours. If TDW had cut half of this out and had a single disc hour long album (still fairly long by my standards), it would be much easier to enjoy the quality that is here, and there is most definitely quality here; it just gets incredibly tired before the end.