This Winter Machine - The Man Who Never Was (2016)

The debut album from this Yorkshire, English band.

The band is a five piece band with a lineup of drums, bass, keyboards, guitars and vocals.

I have never heard about this band before. A band where the average age of the band members must be around 45 years, based on the picture on their homepage. You can also get this album from their homepage, Amazon and Discogs.

The bandmembers may be middle-aged men. Their sound and music is pretty youthful. We are in the middle of the neo-prog scene here. Pendragon and Arena is good references.

The songs are pretty epic without sounding particular symphonic. The sound is too thin for that. The title track is sixteen minutes long and there are two other songs which passes the ten minutes mark. The two final songs are nine and a half minutes long while the shortest song is seven and a half minutes long. No radio hits among these five songs.

The songs are pretty complex and based on keyboards and guitars. The vocals is also playing a big role here. There is a lot of breaks and epic themes here. 

The vocals are pretty good and is suiting this music. Music which is unashamed neo-prog. I also wish the sound was a bit fatter. But that is neo-prog for you. Neo-prog from the 1990s.

There are no great tracks here. But neo-prog fans and (perhaps) symphonic prog fans will lap up this album. It is a good debut album and I hope we will hear a lot more from this band.

3 points