Alexandra Zerner
Opus 1880

This is an album I should like, a sci-fi concept, a massive conceptual album with several vocalists etc. it should be good. At least it could be, Ayreon usually pulls off these several CD releases, Dream Theater also has a few strong ones in their discography and there are a few more. But it is not easy to pull off a two-hour story in the musical format. Zerner has enlisted the help of some skilled musicians and is said to make music in the progressive rock genre and the album has a fairly cool cover as well. But what should we make of this then, does she pull it off or does she fail miserably? Well, the answer might be somewhere in between.

The first thing that strikes me about this album is that it has very much instrumental parts to it, and while that may not necessarily be a bad thing it may get in the way of telling the conceptual story of the album. And while I am on the things I reflect over when it comes to this album, I don’t think that the singers are that great – they are okay but none of them really shine. The production isn’t as brilliant as one would hope, it is quite alright but not great and the album could be more varied to make it captivating through the playing time. I think that this album is too long, two hours is too long – she could easily have kept the album shorter by decreasing the instrumentals, which could have made it half an hour shorter without much effort.

It is an album that has some great highlights, some really exciting parts are to be found on this album but that doesn’t really help the major issue with this album. The album is too long and feels a bit tedious to listen through, it takes too long and you kind of just wait for it to end. This opus is too much, too much instrumental stuff, too much minutes and not enough captivating stuff – not quite enough depth I think. When I listen to this album I keep thinking that she has taken on a project that is a bit too much for her, she doesn’t quite pull it off like the masters of the big conceptual ideas can do. The great moments are too few and too far between, it works for most and is never bad but the sense of rainy, dark streets of London in the 1880s doesn’t quite do it for me, I need more excitement than that.

In the end I think that Alexandra should have kept it shorter, and simpler, she does some things right and other things less right so that we in the end have an album that doesn’t quite excite me. She should be commended for taking on such a project and managing to create a pretty decent end product where there are some highlights but the overall result isn’t a very exciting one. Perhaps she was biting for more than she could chew and in the end the result fell a bit flat and I find Opus 1880 to be an album you probably could overlook without much sense of loss and it is an album probably should like but I don’t.

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