Every now and then, I take a promo from a genre I generally don’t like in an attempt to better understand it. In this case, I decided to take a risk with New York-based band Pyramid, whose 2021 album Validity has the distinction of having several guest musicians with them, the most notable of which is Tim "The Ripper" Owens on vocals. Combine that with a promo promising something akin to Symphony X, I was actually kind of looking forward to this. As it turns out, this is the kind of album that reminds me why I generally dislike prog in the first place.

Validity is over an hour of undeniable instrumental prowess that fails to come together into anything memorable or coherent. There’s plenty of first-rate guitar work with a crushing rhythm section to support noodling solos and trilling keyboard dialogues, and I could easily show you pieces that would lead you to believe this is an excellent album. However, none of that makes up for songwriting whose only idea is to give in to the general prog impulse of shoving every possible instrumental indulgence into a single song and tossing in hairpin time changes to try and hide how none of it goes anywhere, structure and hooks be damned! I suppose Tim is either the biggest draw or largest deterrent depending on your thoughts on him, but I’ll admit he sounds alright on here, probably because there’s no way he wrote the vocal lines due to them being too varied in approach for that. However, that means nothing when the vocal lines in question sound like they’re working for different songs and end up cluttering an already overstuffed package, and the lyrics are certainly bad enough for at least some of them to have been done by him.

I know there are people who love marveling at instrumental prowess, so maybe this album is for you. From where I stand, I feel that a dedication to complex musicianship should be matched with a desire to create well-defined structures that support it rather than barely stand up under their weight. I’m of the opinion that prog often opts for the latter, and Validity certainly doesn’t do anything to invalidate that stance, so if you’re like me and not easily impressed with wankery, do yourself a favor and go back to not knowing this existed.