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listen to clips at: http://www.myspace.com/suspyre 

Maybe I've just been living in a hole in the ground for the past two years, but Suspyre's A Great Divide has been my big musical surprise of the year thus far. How have I missed this band? Never even heard of them before. 

A Great Divide, their sophomore album, is a brilliant fusion of monster melodic metal, lighter progressive metal, classical, soundtrack, and jazz elements. And more. In fact, all of these influences are captured within a single nearly-ten-minute track, "Galactic Backward Movements." 

The album offers more than 70 minutes of entertainment, divided into 12 tracks or two opuses of four movements of each (four including minor movements), which will bring a smile to the prog-heads among us. Yet the album itself is not as in-your-face technical as, for example, Dream Theater or King Crimson. Suspyre is technically solid, but their technical prowess supports solid songwriting (or symphonic composition, as seems more appropriate for certain tracks) rather than the song being written around difficult instrumentals as an afterthought. 

The lyrics as well are moving and original. Some of the best are found in "April in the Fall," a song about a child whose parents ignore her and fight with each other: 

She plays for hours 
She practices the day away 
It keeps the noise down 
From constant battles down the hall 
Only her fingers 
Captured in movements of the keys 
Could feel emotion 
From her distorted withdraw 

So unbridled, she comes unfurled 
And who makes her hold it in 
How overwhelming a song can be 
To drive her cold within

Dan Singleton 
June 18, 2007