Riverside
Love, Fear and the Time Machine
Inside Out
Release Date: 4 September 2015
Review by Rod Whitfield
Don’t get me wrong, Poland’s Riverside are a great band, and this album is cool. They’ve been around for a decade and a half, and this is their sixth album. Love, Fear and the Time Machine is a pretty enthralling slab of proggy rock.
I usually seize upon much of the prog rock and metal stuff that comes out on our album review lists, but this album falls maybe slightly outside my specific sphere of prog tastes. I much prefer prog that goes BOOM, and while this album is extremely well written, well produced, and features strong and quite epic songs and high calibre musicianship, including the singing of frontman Marius Duda who’s voice is soothing and pure, the music is kinda ‘ploddy’ for my precise tastes.
The music of Riverside doesn’t really hit any great heights, and doesn’t possess a great feel for dynamics or rise and fall. It’s just a little on the monotone side of things.
But hey, that’s just me. My tastes come from a lifetime of ingesting the likes of Rush, Dream Theater, Opeth, and more recently Periphery, Karnivool etc. Progressive music that explodes from the speakers. If you favour prog rock that’s a little more cruisy and laid back, this album is way up your alley.