Son Of Aurelius - The Farthest Reaches

I'm really busy as of late. I went to Boston with the girlfriend, grabbed All Pigs Must Die's EP on vinyl, heard about the vinyl repressing being done for Mitochondrion's Archaeaeon and promptly cried since I may not be able to afford the limited Gold Edition anytime soon since I've been spending so much money. I've also been extremely busy with schoolwork. I have three exams in difficult computer science and math classes coming up this week, and while I'm writing this I'm working on finishing a paper about a subject for my easy-mode PoliSci course that is so pointless to address since it's in discussions everywhere, everyday: gay marriage. I'm a page and a half in. Only five more to go and it's almost 1AM...

Anyway I present to you my new quickie format. One paragraph and a score for an album I've stumbled across and don't have time to properly review.

So the first of this series is melodic tech-prog metallers Son Of Aurelius on their debut The Farthest Reaches, with it's bright and flamboyant album cover. It does a great job of expressing the flowery music contained within. Here we have pretty stereotypical tech-prog performed by very young musicians - in other words it's every bit as colorful and zesty as the album cover. That's not really a means of bashing them as tech-prog isn't a simple genre to succeed in, and they deliver the goods when it comes to this subgenre. These guys clearly have talent and they display it copiously on tracks like "Facing The Gorgon," "The Fist, The Serpent," and "A Good Death." There's loads of soloing, plenty of arpeggios, and harmonized twin guitars not unlike many melodic death metal bands. There's not much in the way of brutality on The Farthest Reaches though, so don't go in expecting much there and the production and light guitars won't aggravate. Plus while nothing here is wholly original, it's all executed relatively well by a band that has plenty of time to improve their songwriting talents which are admittedly lacking at this stage but not offensively bad. Definitely a band to watch for in the tech-prog scene.

6.75 out of 10

Tracklisting:

1.	Mercy For Today
2.	Let Them Hate and Fear
3.	The Farthest Reaches
4.	Olympus is Forgotten
5.	Facing the Gorgon
6.	Pandora's Burden
7.	A Champion Reborn
8.	Mycordial Infarction
9.	The Calm
10.	A Good Death
11.	The First, the Serpent

Link removed at request of the band.