Only a few weeks before the new
Ayreon album is released, yay! It is one of those releases I have very high expectations for. So this is the first single from "The human equation" and it gives little taste of what to expect. Two songs from the actual album and two non-album cover versions are included.
The first time I heard the instantly recogniseable
Ayreon keyboard sound during
Day two: Isolation I got a smile on my face. Yes! The man is back. Still there is a very fresh and energized feel to the two album tracks. I will not get into the concept of "The human equation" here, but it seems pretty genius and all the different voices, each representing a specific emotion are combined very well.
The radio edit of
Day Eleven: Love opens and for the first 10 seconds my heart skipped a beat and I was thinking "What if he couldn't renew himself and this is just a reinvention of melodies from Into the electric castle and the Migrator albums?" 20 seconds later I had calmed down and sat back in my chair with a big smile on my face. This was beginning to get very interesting. The song has a very smooth and memorable melody.
James LaBrie (Me) and Heather Findlay (Love) really nail vocal melodies in the verses and Irene Jansen (Passion) and Magnus Ekwall (Pride) let it out in the powerful and catchy chorus. One of the things I'm looking forward to on the full album is to hear more of Marcela Bovio (Wife). She has a really beautiful voice here. Devon Graves (Agony) and Mikael Åkerfeldt (Fear) also appear in this song.
You can probably imagine that the songs can get pretty complex with the use of all these vocalists and sorting through all the emotions, but
Day Eleven: Love pulls this off very well, with lyrics that are well written, easy to identify with and fitting each singer remarkably well. It is a song that sticks in your head after a few listens so obviously a good choice for a single. Fresh with a strange sense of innocence.
Day Two: Isolation adds one of my favorite vocalists, Eric Clayton to the already strong mix. Singing the voice of Reason he comes of with a great sense of authority. This song is longer and more complex than "Day Eleven". It is hard to comment on songs taken out of a whole concept, so I will just say that this one increases my anticipation of the album even further and wait with a deeper analysis until I get the full album. One highlight of this song is the beautiful flute and also the instrumental passage towards the end of the song.
The single also includes two cover songs,
No quater by
Led Zeppelin and
Space Oddity by David Bowie. Never having heard any of these songs in their original versions I found them strangely addictive. Vocal duties on
No Quater are handled by Devon Graves, Magnus Ekwall, Eric Clayton and
James LaBrie.
Space oddity instantly caught my interest with Eric Clayton as the sole vocalist and he adds a lot to its huge atmosphere. I prefer this one to the version found on the
Star One release.
Definitely worth the purchase and now my expectations have gotten another notch up into the stratosphere.
Please Mister Postman, deliver my special ltd. edition of The human equation soon...
Written by
Steen Thursday, May 13, 2004
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