Jason Rubenstein has been around a while making and producing music.  This release is billed as a return to his progressive-rock roots and doesn’t disappoint.  If, like me, you tend to play online games, like maybe Orcs Must Die, and love to play guitar laden energetic rock, this is certainly the album for you. Even if you don’t play online games, with its crisp sounding notes and flow of driven narrative, this album is perfect to play from start to finish uninterrupted. 

While each song has its own flavour, there is a way the songs just fit together, like changing topics in a great conversation, the feeling keeps constant.  The pauses between tunes feel like breathes taken instead of the changing of the tracks.  There’s an energy to the album, even with the low undulating drive that beats through, the sense of forward motion to a goal is there. An unmistakable veracity that the songs bring forth.

From “The Contemplation Of The Cosmologer” on through the album, the narrative, while changing, all has this discourse amongst the instruments.  You can feel them speak to one another and to the listener.   Close your eyes and put the headphones on and you can see the journey through the mind and soul of this universe the album puts forward.  From space through the landscape of the earth onto the fiction world and through time the journey never ends, even with the last song.

In tracks like “The Steppes of Sighs Part 2” the piano even takes on the same driving force that energizes the entire album.  A motivation that isn’t seen as much kept as a constant throughout a 12 track album.  Down to the cover of  “The Barbarian” this album can push forth the listener into an endeavor through their mind, into the world, into the future.

To download the digital album or buy a physical CD/Bundle, click HERE