Whyzdom
As Time Turns to Dust

And so it finally ends, the longest and dreariest work on a review so far this year. But how do I best put words on screen about it? I can start by saying that I still have the opening half of the first album I heard by these guys, it was called Blind? and was released in 2012. I described it in the Swedish review as a musical orgasm, but then it sort of ended with way too much songs of lesser calibre than the opening tracks but thanks to those tracks in my playlist I am always excited about new stuff from Whyzdom. But the previous album released in 2015 was a big disappointment, good but eventually too long and too uninteresting and this time it is even worse.

Whyzdom are inspired by film music from composers like Zimmer and Elfman, I too like films and film scores and especially the epic ones by mentioned composers and many more. I also generally like female vocalists more than male vocalists, albeit with a small margin. And progressive, grande, symphonic music is something I have enjoyed since the first time I heard such music. So these guys do the exact music that I rate amongst my absolute favourite style of music – but they fail to make it particularly good. And how do you write about an album where you feel that these guys should have saved themselves the embarrassment of releasing it without seeming like a pompous ass? I guess you don’t, but then the work of listening and thinking, analysing what you have heard goes to waste and I always review the albums I have started work on and it would really have been a waste not writing about an album I have played through more than 20 times now.

Twenty times and the only track that makes an impression is the first, Armour of Dust that I think is a pretty good song – slightly ruined by a vocalist that is quite a poor English speaker, but the accent is just a little bit detrimental and could have been helped had she sung in French instead. It is not the language but the 45 minutes that follows the opening track that is the problem with this album. I have played this album over 20 times over a thousand minutes and the chorus and one or two poorly pronounced words is the only thing I can recall from it. It plays and then it is instantly forgotten, kind of like painting the sea or laying out stamps on a table on a windy day, it just vanishes. It makes no impression whatsoever, I have played the album five times today and even as I play it while writing this the only songs I have in my mind are Of Jupiter and Moons by Temperance, several songs from the recent Ayreon live release, some songs from the W.E.T. album I reviewed recently and the opening track from the Vyre album I reviewed yesterday – I don’t even listen when I am writing about it – it is that uninteresting.

Pointless and forgettable, that is really the way I would describe this album. And that’s really sad since I know they are capable of making fantastic stuff, they did it in 2012 but in 2018 I can’t wait to throw the tracks away from my computer and move on to something more interesting like one more typical AOR album or something like that. If I have any lasting impression from this album it is that they should have done better than this and that this album really turns time to dust.

HHHHHHH