Reviews

The latest release from Ian Parry and his Consortium Project, Children Tomorrow, is the fourth installment in his musical series. If you are a fan of Arjen Lucassen's Ayreon project, then Parry's vision here will certainly fit the bill for you. This is certainly progressive metal, with plenty of sweeping keyboard orchestrations, crunchy metal guitar riffs (courtesy of Parry's Elegy mate Joshua Dutrieux, Winter's Bane guitarist Lou St.Paul, Niels Vejylt, and Henk van der Laars), an assortment of guest female vocalists, and Parry's husky vocal delivery. It's all pretty melodic yet ultimately heavy & progressive stuff, certainly the most aggressive material Ian has fed his fanbase in quite some time...
www.seaoftranquility.org/reviews.php?op=showcontent&id=5786

...The music of the series is dramatic, panoramic and bombastic with the emphasis on heavy guitar. In some ways the structure here is similar to the work of Ayreon mixed with the style and structure of bands such as Magnum. There are 11 tracks all in the four-minute range and each of them is huge. The sound is very aggressive and expansive, with male and female choirs adding to the grand scale of the concept. Parry’s vocal style is clearly built on the heavy metal approach; forceful, perhaps even reaching, but never straining, very similar in style to that of James Labrie of Dream Theatre. Each of the tracks follows a pretty straight forward song structure but where the project becomes enjoyable is in Parry’s ability craft a simple but powerful melody. Each track is then imbued with certain hard-edged symphonic embellishments; the afore mentioned choirs, orchestral/synth strings, spoken word passages, sound effects, huge crescendos and so on...
www.jerrylucky.com/reviews%20a-e_011.htm

...Most compositions are quite similar in build up; with an intro of varying length at first, then usually a verse-chorus-verse chorus structure, followed by a break and a solo. The final part of the compositions usually consists of either verse and chorus or the chorus being repeated, and some tunes have an outro. In many cases this similarity in structure would result in tunes being pretty similar, but in this case the elements fleshing out this basic structure containing enough variation in pace, mood and atmosphere to give each song a strong identity. Indeed, most songs here are very good, with only a couple of tunes failing to captivate me. If melodic metal or power metal is to your liking, this is a release clearly worth checking out. Especially if you are fond of powerful vocals or concept albums.
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