Transglobal 2025
Cryogenic Dreams
Expanding the boundaries of prog idiom to freeze time in space, intrepid art-rockers redefine their course on sophomore offering.
Sometimes, if a music platter doesn’t immediately grab the listener by the throat only to grow on its audience later, that’s by design rather than the record’s writers’ inability to captivate those who mentally watch their sonic spectacle, and this is the way “Cryogenic Dreams” works. The ensemble behind the album may not be too original in outlining a futuristic setting where refugees from our planet sleep onboard an interstellar vessel and experience worrisome visions of the past, yet they’re building on what the band’s 2023 debut formulated to create, and paint in bold stylistic strokes, a story which will gain gravity with each new spin. More so, each new spin will reveal both deeper meaning of the nine pieces on display and the songs’ melodic magnetism.
There are enough twists and turns here to warrant repeated returns to these tracks, and there’s a potential hit that the penultimate ballad “Hollow Heart” conceals in its pop-core, but to get to this point one has to navigate heavier – in terms of arrangement and subject matter – expanses. Unlike many of their peers, the American quartet don’t go for epic scope on a per-track basis, preferring to propel the scale on an album level, and here’s why the platter’s thematic scene is set in two opening numbers, the interplay between Anthony Romero’s earthly ivories and Robeone’s, Robert Schlinder’s, cosmic synthesizers coloring aural space. As Steve Bonino’s voice and bass sculpt thrill and anxiety in equal measures and economic, if harmonically rich, interjections of Eric Confer’s guitar are punctuated by the guesting Jimmy Keegan’s thunderous drums, dark waves descend upon the tineful narrative, and faux-techno riff enter the frame. Yet when sax licks enhance the human touch of the collective’s method, “Puddle Of Tears” introduces sparser, creepier, harder textures in which organ passages reign supreme, and “Face Of Sorrow” intensifies the record’s nervous image through moderately bombastic ivories, spoken word and engaging refrains.
Still, while the clockwork-metered “After The Disaster” reaches for progressive sort of bluesy despair, the airy “Before The Rain” opts for a big-sky, piano-sprinkled sound scheme to lighten it all up and pull in the threads of optimism. However, “Our Resting Place” bounces to an infectious, rumba-like chug and call-and-response in a quite unexpected manner, and the largely instrumental “Finding A New Home” brings things to a close via the hope-filled AOR-scented rock ‘n’ roll. Gelling into another dangerous journey, the tracks of “Cryogenic Dreams” feel too engaging not to join in their run.
****1/2
