Enchant
The Great Divide

There has been a decade of silence regarding the music of american progressive rockband Enchant - until now. Their eighth album is named The Great Divide which could refer to the time between the albums as their seventh album Tug of War saw the light of day in 2003. So the fans have been waiting and waiting, most of them have probably given up on the band by now. They do have found a decent cover art for the new album but what about the music? One question always arise when taking on albums from bands that has been away from the spotlight for an extended period of time: was it worth the wait? And did they spend all this time perfecting their craft before releasing the next album?

Well, I think that the latter is not what happened, as it sounds as the band did in the past. It also sounds kind of like the standard format of the genre if there is such a thing in the progressive genre. The surprises doesn’t really surprise and the progressive elements don’t feel that progressive anymore. That doesn’t change the fact that the sound quality is excellent, the singer is great and they build their songs around very strong melodies and musical depth. Kind of like you expect from bands in the genre. Faithful to the genre, the songs are generally quite long and the eight tracks play for near the hour which gives us an average song length of over seven minutes. Quite long that means but they have the variation to keep it interesting for that amount of time, just like the best bands of the genre do.

How about it then? I would describe it as a good album, very good in fact. The album is impressive in many ways and fans of both the band and the progressive rock genre will probably enjoy it. They play on the classical side of the genre, a nod back towards the seventies where the melodies are the focal point, not the more heavy style that is more prominent today. So I think we can conclude that it is a very good album but at the same time I cannot overlook that fact that it feels as though they haven’t really found any new tricks during their long hiatus. That’s a bit of a shame but at the same time it does not really make the album worse just less memorable and less timeless.

All eight tracks are good, solid progressive songs with catchiness, cleverness, great melodies and great classical progressiveness. I think they push all the right buttons to appeal to fans of the genre so fans of the band and fans of the genre should definitely look at this album. Especially the opening track Circles and the title track which are great. I like this album, I may complain about its longevity of the lack of innovative grips but the fact is that it is still a very good album and an enjoyment to listen to. I think it is an enchanting album.

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