X-World/5-New Universal Order

Locomotive/AFM
2008

This supergroup of sorts includes vocalist Nils K. Rue (Pagan's Mind), bassist Magnus Rosen (Hammerfall), guitarists Andy LaRocque (King Diamond), Reeves Garels (Tin Machine, David Bowie) and rounding out the line-up is drummer Big Swede. Rosen called this "heavy metal for the year 3005". Well, if that is true then would metal won't be progressing a whole lot in the next 900+ years. Reeves throws in some spacey guitar parts here and there and there are some light industrial beats going on intermittently. Plus there are various and chirps that I guess are supposed to make us believe we are on a spaceship or something. Instead most of these "futuristic" bits do not add to the sound as they tend to just not be enough to effective. There is no doubt about the talent brought together here. I am interested in any project involving Andy LaRocque and he certainly delivers. I think the overall sound here is something like Queensryche with better guitar solos, but with a lot of unnecessary parts thrown in. I mean the future/space theme is fine as an idea. However I never got a sense that they completely commit to that idea. Instead it's like they have this light progressive metal sound which is fine yet they tacked on these odd parts in the hopes of making it different. Unfortunately those parts tend to be distracting and even pointless in the whole scheme of things. Maybe this idea could have worked had the spacey parts and metal parts complimented one another, but that's not what occurred here.

http://www.myspace.com/xworld5