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Ajalon's "This Good Place" is only the third album they have released and it comes fourteen years after their debut. Randy George, known for his collaborations with Rick Wakeman, Steve Hackett and Neal Morse among others, is the obvious big name involved in this Christian progressive rock band and, along with Dan Lile (mainly) and Will Henderson (secondarily), is the man responsible for most of the music written here. Their name, as almost every Christian rock band's name with self esteem, is taken from the Bible and means "grace in the midst of the fire" or something like that. Hmm… I read again what I just wrote and it sounds a bit ironic. Well, this wasn't my intention in the first place, although I never understood what Christianity, or any religion for that matter, has to do with any music genre, besides gospels. Mysticism, spirituality and inner search has so little in common with religions anyway. Not that Neal Morse's "Sola Scriptura" wasn't a masterpiece, even it was referring to Martin Luther, but there has to be one exception to every rule I guess...
Anyway, let us move forward. To the music itself. I've never been a big fan of Ajalon's view of prog and "This Good Place" won't change my impression about it. Almost the whole album is in a limp mellow mood (with two exceptions I'm about to mention later on), without ever intending to reach a climax. Passion can be expressed either out loud or introspectively. None of the above take place here though. Melodies are not that intricate, vocal style is the same in almost every song, plus time signatures and scales aren't as unusual as they are meant to be on a prog record. When "Redemption", the inevitable epic song, adds quite a few in terms of variety, despite Robyn Dawn's wonderful vocal performance on it, what is left for me to say? Seriously, why isn't she Ajalon's lead singer already? Then there is of course the positive side, which consists of the very direct social commentary, above par musicianship, but mostly two songs: "Abstract Malady" and "Lullaby Of Bedlam" are pure progressive rock delights to these ears. Experimental, excellently instrumented, adventurous, dark and therefore attractive music. If only they were more songs of this kind on offer...
To summarise, this is an uneven to boring album saved by two tremendous bright spots. |
