Fates Warning – Long Day Good Night
Release Date: 6th November 2020
Label: Metal Blade Records
Bandcamp
Genre: Progressive Metal, Metal.
FFO: Queensryche, Dream Theater, A Perfect Circle, Rush, Pink Floyd.
Review By: Jonathon Hopper
After nearly forty years in the business you’d have thought the assorted members of Connecticut prog veterans Fates Warning had seen it all. From the commercial and critical highs of 1991’s ‘Parallels’, through the line-up changes, the fallow periods and the recent return to their spiritual roots with Metal Blade.
They’ve even supposedly been credited with pioneering the whole progressive metal genre by none other than Dream Theater. A not inconsiderable accolade and one that Long Day Good Night – the outfit’s thirteenth studio album and the first since 2016’s ‘Theories of Flight’ – certainly does its best to live up to.
Starting amid an ocean of gently washing keyboards and warbling guitars that announce the arrival of Ray Adler’s rich, layered vocals on opener The Destination Onward, the journey continues with the driving Shuttered World – a traditional rocker that sees the band pushing through the gears towards a rousing chorus with a nice line in spiralling guitars.
Alone We Walk follows – a chugging monster like Queensryche making out with Tool on the back of a low loader – that leads into nu metal inflected Now Comes the Rain. It’s a crisp, radio friendly affair that highlights a slight departure into more overtly commercial territory.
As fans of Fates Warning mayhave come to expect, Long Day Good Night is an album of considerable scope, featuring some 13 songs spanning over 72 minutes. From ethereal soundscapes like The Way Home with its delicate build up culminating in a sonic onslaught that brings to mind A Perfect Circle to the gorgeous strings and strumming of Under the Sun to full on metal belters like Scars, Adler intoning ‘I stand amongst the smoking ruins’.
Hopefully he isn’t referring to the fortnight he spent in pandemic-stricken Madrid sleeping on a studio floor in order to get his vocals down.
When Snow Falls drifts and flurries, a brittle and darkly beautiful paean to regret but some of the early momentum is lost in the second half through unremarkable rockers like Liar and Glass Houses.
Still, there’s ethereality and then there’s just plain bonkers and penultimate tome – the 11 and a half minute The Longest Shadow of the Day – offers both. Opening with a three-minute jazz jam before axeman/ producer Jim Matheos flies into full-on fret fetishism tossing out more scales than your local fishmongers, until slowing for the final denouement that sounds not unlike Pink Floyd’s ‘Animals’ boiling into space.
It’s a song that encapsulates Long Day Good Night as a whole. Grand, ambitious and sweeping in scale, some of what’s on offer is truly sublime. As I have to review the whole thing though, I’d have to say that a slightly shorter day would have made for an even better night.
(3.5 / 5)
