39. Flaming Row / Mirage - A Portrayal Of Figures [2014]The band's second release, and final collaboration between Martin Schnella and Kiri Geile …. Sadly, because the subsequent album w/o Kiri sucked ass, and I don't think there will be any more Flaming Row - certainly not anything that approaches the level of awesomeness of the first two releases. Which is disappointing, as I think the plan was for this to be a 3-album trilogy. This duo somehow manages to attract an incredibly strong list of vocalists (Ted Leonard, Magali Luyten), and musicians (Jimmy Keegan, Arjen, Billy Sherwood, Dave Meros, Kristoffer Gildenlow Gary Wehrkamp). While a great album with tons of musical diversity – metal, prog, folk, ballad, funk/jazz etc … I found it a bit of a difficult story to follow though; it seemed strange that not only were the vocalists playing multiple parts/roles/characters, but additionally, one character would have multiple vocalists singing the role. For instance, the main protagonist, “John” was voiced by four different singers… while those four singers also voiced different characters – and sometimes the same vocalist singing two different characters in the same song - which oft left me as confused as a baby in a topless bar. Without routinely following the lyric sheet, there’s simply no way to know what the hell is going on in the story – and even still the story is a little convoluted.
Fun fact… when I saw Spock’s Beard at PPUSA, I had Jimmy/Ted/Dave autograph the cover of this album, and as I ran down the table/line, Ryo was looking confused as Jimmy passed the booklet back to me, and not to him. He looked at Jimmy and said “did I play on this?” “No” was Jimmy's response
Fave Song -
Aim L45Or, if you want a better representation of what the album is like,
Pictures (Ted is god-fucking-tier despite a fairly limited role on this song).