All right then, this is the one I’m going to kick off with, in tribute to Anteater, who introduced the band to me through one of his threads. I had never even heard of them, but he mentioned the “T” word, and any band that’s favourably compared to Threshold will always find a welcome here. I just listened to the one track he posted, liked it, agreed it shared elements with the Surrey prog metallers and got the album. This is my first time to listen to it.
Album title: I Wonder
Artist: Teramaze
Nationality: Australian
Year: 2020
Chronology: 7
The Trollheart Factor*: 0
Track Listing: Ocean Floor/Only Daylight/Lake 401/A Deep State of Awake/Here to Watch You/Sleeping Man/Run/Idle Hands - The Devil’s Workshop/This is Not a Drill/I Wonder
Comments:Good rocky start, like the use of the piano and the keys. Vocalist has a lot of talent. “Only Daylight” has more of a hook to it, kind of AOR-ish really, though I would make the tentative point that so far nothing has been that memorable. Not on the first listen anyway. “Lake 401” might change that. Has an odd feeling of a-ha about it, around the
Analogue era. The orchestral keys are nice. Sort of a ballad, though not quite. Ominous kind of sound. More orchestral style keys in “A Deep State of Awake”, and yes, this one sounds
very Threshold indeed. Even down to the death vocals the other guys use on “Slipstream” from the
Dead Reckoning album. Rocks along nicely.
“Here to Watch You” surprises me so much I thought Spotify was shuffling albums on me! It’s like a weak indie rock song or something, very acoustic with a somewhat whiny vocal and it just seems totally out of place here. Weird. Okay well now it’s kicked into life, but I do not like how it started. Very off-putting. Yeah. I have to say, the more this goes on, the more my initial enthusiasm is wearing off and being replaced with a slack-jawed, glassy-eyed feeling of “yeah but so?” I mean it’s okay, but apart from a few quite good tracks I haven’t heard anything that has really made me think this could be a band I would enjoy getting into. And I just notice that the previous track was the “Sleeping Man” which Ant praised so highly. Oh dear. The next one is a proper ballad, entitled “Run”, which I hope is not intended as advice.
Actually a) it’s not quite a ballad as it picks up halfway and b) it’s not bad at all. Some very nice, uncredited as far as I can see, sax there, but the longest track, “Idle Hands/The Devil’s Workshop” just doesn’t make that much of an impression on me. I mean it’s good, but not that memorable to me. Second part is good actually; a few more listens and I might like it more. It Might just be me but I tend to really only like the ones where Teramaze sound like a cheap Threshold, and here again on “This is Not a Drill” then emulate my favourites again: big choruses, hooky song, changes in tempo and some nice close-harmony backing vocals, soft piano then hard guitar. Very Threshold. Nice closer but it can’t lift the album above the level of just “pretty decent”, when I had expected so much more. Something of a disappointment. Maybe I set the bar too high. No, blame Anteater. Yeah. That’s a better strategy.
Track(s) I liked: “Only Daylight”, “Lake 401”, “A Deep State of Awake”, “Run”, “This is Not a Drill”, "I Wonder"
Track(s) I didn’t like: “Here to Watch You”
One standout: Couldn’t really say anything here stands out, as that has to be a track that is head and shoulders above the rest, and I don’t see one here that’s good enough.
One rotten apple: “Here to Watch You”
Overall Impression: Yeah it’s okay but not the revelation I had hoped for. A few more listens and I might get more into it, but on first listen it doesn’t quite live up to the hype. I suppose it’s possible that if I hadn’t heard Threshold first I might like this more, but hell, the English lads do it so much better, and with more consistency.
Rating: 7/10
Future Plan: May give it another shot at some point.
* You can probably work this out, but in case you haven’t visited my History of Prog journal, the Trollheart Factor is a measure of how well, or not, I know the artist, on a scale of 0 to 10.