Nth Ascension
Stranger Than Fiction

Stranger Than Fiction certainly has an interesting ring to it, perhaps even exciting, but is it really that strange when Nth Ascension shows us the third album? The artwork is nice and conveys the idea well, the song titles does not add to this other than revealing that they have a story going through the albums, three songs on this one continues the story – can it be like the chapters that Saga added to their albums? Perhaps inspired. Progressive rock is what they describe it like, something that isn’t always very progressive as it is a collective name for albums with sweeping melodies, long tracks, complex song structures and time signatures – not always music that shows any kind of progressive spirit.

This album does the things many progressive bands do, long tracks, complex tracks with lots of filling and less substance. It is kind of like they are hiding the lack of ideas behind layers and layers of soundscapes and a strong production on an album that is needlessly long. They don’t have a particularly good singer either, and while the production is quite good it is clear that they don’t really have any ideas of their own since they borrow most of the typical stuff from many of their genre colleges and end up creating a caricature of the genre. The albums starts feeling too long before you have gotten through the first song and after that it is still more than an hour before it ends.

If you ever need a cure for insomnia and don’t want to do pills or if you need to augment the pills with something this is a good choice because it is so boring that it makes anyone loose the will to remain conscious. You zone out of the album and then many years after it started it falls silent and you don’t really remember anything of what you have heard, I have a hard time thinking of things to write about how it sounds even though I have played it many times and plays it now when I write these words. I think that it is a dreary creation that can’t make anyone happy and it makes me wonder why they actually figured that it was a good idea to release such an album – are they so devoid of inspiration and ideas that this is the best they can come up with?

Perhaps they should have thrown this away and started over, it is unlikely that the end result would have been worse. Almost all the stuff released in 2019 is a better choice than this album – this boring creation where the only thing stranger than fiction is the fact that it was released, and the only logical end would be that it wasn’t bought by anyone.

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