Chris McGovern

I'm not a long-term A7X fan, really just familiar with the "hits" before this. Criticism of A7X's prior work just makes me laugh, because they freely acknowledge their influences and talk extensively about why their songs are long. They've never been about 3.5 minute, single riff, verse chorus verse tunes. They have always piled on more sounds and changes than the average listener wants or needs. When you consider the years that went into this, nobody should have expected the same old thing, especially after The Stage. I don't think they meant to turn into a prog metal band, but that's absolutely what this album is. It's heavier, darker and in a lot of ways more random than your typical Dream Theater piece. It shows off their two strongest assets, Gates and Wackerman. While concept albums are first and foremost about the music, you do have to consider the concept. These guys sang about death for years, then experienced it. I haven't read Camus, but existential crises provide quite a conceptual blank slate. There's not a cohesive narrative, so there aren't musical themes that repeat from song to song, it's musically a bunch of stuff that happens with a nice little piano coda. But that stuff is consistently thrilling. In a different music industry environment, A7X would tour playing the whole album, with a second short set of the hits. That's just not how it works anymore, at least at the arena level. That's a shame because LIBAD is the most interesting thing I've heard in a long, long time and I've been obsessed with it in the two weeks since it dropped.