Glass Hammer – The Breaking Of The World

This new album by US Glass Hammer could be compared to a cocktail recipe: a good dosis of prog ingredients, remove some spices (out with Yes singer Jon Davison), add previously used ones (vocalists Carl Grover and Suzie Bogdanowicz), splash a bit of sweetness over the music, stir and serve!
Presented with big drum rolls by the band as their most progressive album to date, I can't avoid feeling here the sneaking horns of self-advertising; all depends on how you emphasize the word "progressive"! This album has a lot of classic prog-rock elements, from rich sound textures to odd meters and the writing is still top; but if progressive means to you going ahead and breaking new territories, then it's not! The Breaking of the World also gives a lot of place to vocals and lyrics, some of them like "Third Floor" showing great humour and perspective, where we deal with the feelings of an elevator! So in a way, this album is nearly a conceptual song based one, the instrumental passages at the service of the stories and not the other way; it is a bit hard - after having found a nearly perfect match with singer Jon Davison - to get back to shifting voices and types; I would also say this overflow of vocals has a cost for the musical coherence, even if a micro-chirurgical attention has been taken to the least details. And maybe here is the problem, with an album of (too) well experienced musicians, trying to get the perfect catch, at the risk of overproducing or even flirting too much with thoughts like accessability, catchy riffs, pleasing fans ?? All this is of course much subjective but I do not mean the album lives up to the huge self-praise announced by the band and I would certainly choose other, which to my ears are more successful, but underlying at the end that the musicianship level on this one still remains at a very high level!