SHADOW GALLERY – Prime Cuts
Whenever a Metal Best Of album is released, one has to raise the question if the world has waited for such a compilation from the respective band at all. What is common practice in Pop music, and very justified since most of the artists in the charts don’t have more quality work to offer than one track or two per album, is a far rarer thing in Metal. The five regular studio albums of the band are all Prog Rock highlights, and deserve to be in a Prog fan’s collection: Shadow Gallery from 1992, Carved In Stone from 1995, 1998’s Tyranny, and Legacy from 2001. Those four were released on Magna Carta Records, who also are publishing Prime Cuts now, and -– you guessed correctly -– they left out the band’s latest output Room V, which was preceded by a label change to Inside Out Records. Unfortunately, many regard Room V as the best SG album to date, which makes its absence even more regrettable. Magna Carta chose to put together this album anyway, and one must give them credit for they did a good job with it, especially under the circumstance that many Shadow Gallery tracks, and mostly the progressive highlights of their albums, tend to be rather long: “Cliffhanger” from Carved In Stone is 8:41 minutes long, “The Queen Of The City Of Ice” from the debut album is 17:11 minutes, “First Light” from Legacy clocks in at 34:17 minutes, and “Cliffhanger 2” from the same album at 13:05. Magna Carta had to leave all those tracks out, except for the second part of “Cliffhanger 2,” which is included in an edited version. Among the 11 tracks previously published are highlights from all of the four releases, with a slight emphasis on Tyranny. With all these emotional, intelligent …READ MORE
