Five of the Eyes
The Venus Transit
self-released
The best progressive rock strives for beauty. All those meticulously arranged guitar suites and show-offy time signatures are just complicated ways to reach rapture. On its first full-length album, The Venus Transit, Five of the Eyes achieves beauty again and again. The Portland five-piece exhibits a rare ability to execute thorny musical passages with mathematical precision without sounding cold or aloof. Guitarists Ned Rich and Tim Meehan are downright virtuosic, delivering hammer-on-happy metal riffage and soft, ethereal picking with ease. Singer Darrell Foster’s gifts are more warm-blooded; his soaring falsetto gives this album its emotional foundation. And producer Jonathan Wyman deserves honorary membership in the group for the album’s pristine sound quality. None of the lyrics particularly caught my attention, and in one song, when Foster weaves in a line from “Ring Around the Rosie,” it detracts from the proceedings. But when presented along with music constructed as creatively as the instrumentation on the closing track, “Delta,” words will inevitably fall by the wayside. In under five minutes, the band packs in fist-pumping melodic metal, a two-headed hydra of syncopated math-rock riffs, and a haunted bridge of exquisite minor chords that sounds like something off The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. When the song reached that bridge it happened for me. I realized I wasn’t just listening to a bunch of really good players. I was hearing something genuinely gorgeous.
— Joe Sweeney
