Fates Warning - A Pleasant Shade of Gray (1997)^{Release ID: 2312}

I can always get behind the idea of changing your sound a bit.  Fates Warning have slowly done that over the course of several albums, but typically, they will remain a metal band.  It's not so apparent in A Pleasant Shade of Grey, in fact I'd go as far as to say it's not a full-on metal album, but rather rock with a couple metal influences.  And I'm totally cool with that.  I was hoping this album would be one of the absolute berst of its type, but Fates Warning has only impressed me once in that vein out of several albums, so my expectations were closer to the 9/10 vein.

From what I've studied, Fates Warning are basically a top 10 in prog metal as far as popularity and influence goes.  Of course, when you're going to tackle prog, you have to be careful that your technical melodies and the harmony of the instruments don't come off as wonky.  Part II was fairly guilty of that during the verses, so the first two parts didn't really do much for me musically, despite setting a good preconceived standard for the rest of the album.  But it took way too long for me to get to a spot to where I could feel like absorbing an atmosphere, bobbing my head, getting intrigued, etc.  Part 5 had a good level of psychedelic intrigue to it, but it simply wasn't strong enough to stand out amongst the masses of prog rock or metal IMO and it didn't justify the wonkiness in the other parts of the song.  Things started to feel more fleshed out and make more sense in the second half, featuring better examples of prog that took a few key directions that cemented the second half as superior to the first.  But when the band was trying out some metal in the fix, the softer focus of the album got in the way of heaviness, making it feel more like general rock, so while they have every right to make a rockier album, any metal should actually be metal.

it shows this vintage group of prog metal pioneers somehow struggling to maintain proper atmosphere, being more focused on maintaining a softer presence that they only occasionally succeed at.  This is also to say that when it was trying to be metal, it wasn't heavy enough.  They have every right to change their sound, and this was a pretty good attempt with a few good songs, some interesting technical ideas and a little bit of experimentation that never broke the flow.  But sometimes it feels a little empty, and sometimes the rythms are a bit wonky, so the album feels incomplete.

There comes a time in every bands career when they decide it's time to make changes to their sound. Some bands do it flawlessly, gaining new fans and keeping old ones. Other bands fail miserably, alienating everyone. 'A Pleasant Shade of Gray' by Fates Warning, is an example of a band doing it properly.

The bands previous albums were seeing a steady incline in quality and success, and there was no question that ‘Parallels’ and ‘Inside Out’ would be hard to top without sounding repetitive, but with ‘A Pleasant Shade of Grey’ the band really hit their stride as a "prog" band, with what I consider to be some of their greatest work.

Having lost one guitar, but gaining a keyboard in its place (in the form of ex-Dream Theater keyboardist Kevin Moore), Fates Warning take on a more progressive feel with their music. Gone are the metal songs of their previous releases, and in their place stands atmospheric, beautifully eerie pieces of music. There's still plenty of heavy riffs to keep faithful fans happy, but the album as a whole seems to have more focus on mood and ambience.

As always with this band, the musicianship is remarkable. Drummer Mark Zonder really takes the spotlight here, and Jim Matheos has written some of his most thoughtful guitar riffs, maintaining the complexity associated with this style of music, without having to rely on an endless barrage of notes jammed into every bar.

It's hard to point out any specific highlights, as the album works so much better as a single piece, rather than by its individual components. It's a concept album, you know how it is, right? It's not the sort of record which grows on you after one listen, but then, isn't that the sort of thing prog fans love about the genre?