3 - Wake Pig

*=Staff's pick	Alien Angel* Monster Dregs Wake Pig Bramfatura Trust Dogs Of War Soul To Sell One Way Town Queen* Circus Without Clowns Where's Max Amaze Disgrace*

Genre	Progressive Rock	Joey Eppard	Vocals
Tracks	13	Joey Eppard	Guitar
Runningtime	58 Min.	Billy Riker	Guitar
Label	Metal Blade	Daniel Grimsland	Bass
Release	16 Jan. 2006	Chris Gartmann	Drums
Country	USA	Joe Stote	Keyboards
Similar artists	Porcupine Tree

3 is indeed very hard to place on a musical map. Sometimes it is happy acoustic guitar based pop, next minute it is dark riffing rock. To make it easy, let us just call it progressive. Let's also make clear that singer (and guitarist) Joey Eppard does not have a metal voice. Actually, in some passages (Dogs Of War for example) I came to think of Alexander Bard's singing in his old group Army Of Lovers. Eppard is though, from time to time, backed by quite heavy music.

Alien Angel can summon the whole sound in some ways - a few hard riffs, some softer parts and a quite catchy chorus. Monster and Dregs are more progressive and harder to take in at once, while the title song Wake Pig rather becomes annoying quite fast. Dogs Of War is a soft, acoustic piece that works fine in the context. But it becomes too much with another slow song in a row, Soul To Sell. Therefore, One Way Town, a rather harmless piece of pop with a quite nice guitar riff, cannot manage to regain the tempo of the record. Queen lets us stay in mid-tempo land, but passes with a catchy melody. For some reason I hate songs about clowns (even when they are missing), and it does not help that Circus Without Clowns has an extremely annoying chorus. Where's Max is a quite wasteable jam part. The finish with Amaze Disgrace works well though.

Great musicianship is a trademark for progressive music, and in this matter 3 do not fall behind. But this is unfortunately not all there is to it. The album is too long to make it all the way. Some parts are straight boring. The really great songs are too unevenly distributed. After Alien Angel you expect the album to continue just as vital and explosive, but instead it takes a dive into some enormous, cold ocean.