Sage's Recital

Sage's Recital do not lack for talent. That much is clear.

Bandleader Niels Vejlyt (pronounced "Violet," apparently) is one of the fastest shredders you'll ever hear, bassist Franck Hermanny comes with Adagio credits and plenty of ability, drummer Jakob Vand doggedly follows both of them with quality speed and precision, and while vocalist John West is a veteran, his voice remains in fine shape in the millennium's second decade.

These four musicians getting together to play epic progressive metal, then, has some pretty impressive potential. Sadly, Sage's Recital delivers on very little of it.

On this set of five vocal tracks and two instrumentals, there are a whole lot of moments where Vejlyt and his bandmates reinforce their technical wizardry, but sadly far fewer where they create compelling music.

While the album seems to be constructed largely as a showcase for Vejlyt, he ultimately is the biggest problem here. He crams sweeping and tapping into almost every nook and cranny of the disc. Songs get minute-long intros of him noodling up and down the guitar, verses cut out midstream so he can take solo breaks, and even his rhythm playing can't help but incorporate a ton of excess notes in most places. He's a hell of a player, and his speed will bend the minds of even the most shredding-acquainted listeners, but frankly his style isn't very inventive, as he's content to merely wander up and down the guitar in familiar (and same-sounding) ways that are rarely memorable.

Strangely, despite his status as bandleader and his ridiculous, Yngwie-on-speed excesses, Vejlyt's guitars are relatively poorly produced here. He gets a razor-thin, limp guitar tone, and a lot of his technical wizardry is mixed into the background, so while this album is clearly written to showcase him, it's not really produced to mirror that intent.

The production issues extend to Vand's drums and West's vocals, which both are too dry for this sort of music, giving the album a fairly sterile feeling overall--only the keyboards and, to an extent, the bass really are adequately produced to meet the epic intents of these technical, oversized tracks.

The other major flaw on the band's debut is the vocal melodies, which often are so scattered that it's as though Vejlyt constructed them by throwing darts. This is particularly evident in opener "The Power Within," which goes nowhere. Vejlyt mostly keeps West in the upper part of his range, and West gives it a hell of a shot, but he's much better off in a midrange groove these days. He performs solidly enough throughout, but rarely are the melodies constructed well enough to give these songs any momentum, which then makes Vejlyt's showboating completely arbitrary. He's forgotten the cardinal rule of shredding: a solo's intensity can't exceed the momentum the song has going into it.

All that said, it's not as though these guys can go 53 minutes without having a few moments that show potential. "Council of Dragons" is the best track here, because it's the one where West is actually in his best range, and the chorus actually gives him a really nice bluesy hook to run with. It's a beautiful moment that sounds unlike anything else on the album, but here that's a good thing. Building ballad "Immortal Flame," a duet with West and Anne Karine Pripp (who really isn't very good), actually has a lot of very good moments in its near-ten-minute runtime, but they're stitched together loosely with a lot of seams showing. The same goes for closer "The Last Battle"--the best six minutes of the 15-minute meanderer would make a hell of a song. Instrumental "The Dead of Winter" threatens to actually be one of the more interesting shred/powerprog instrumental tracks around until Vejlyt ruins it with a ridiculous solo in the last two minutes that actually manages to make Michael Angelo Batio look tasteful. Seriously, it might be the most over-the-top mess of notes out there (You'd think the instrumentals would be a better format for Vejlyt to run wild in a more appropriate context, but the other, "The Last Unicorn," is a surprisingly tepid showcase due to his lack of inventiveness).

Sage's Recital (especially Vejlyt) just can't get out of their own way here. There's little creativity on display despite the technical prowess of the band, several cringeworthy melodies, guitar runs, and transitions pop up, and the decent amount of good ideas that Vejlyt & Co. come up with often lead to dead ends. Sadly, an overhaul on several fronts is needed if these supremely talented individuals are going to create memorable material together.