Band:	Teramaze
Album:	Flight Of The Wounded
Style:	Progressive metal
Release date:	October 06, 2022
A review by:	musclassia

01. Flight Of The Wounded
02. Gold
03. The Thieves Are Out
04. Until The Lights
05. Ticket To The Next Apocalypse
06. For The Thrill
07. Dangerous Me
08. Battle
09. In The Ruins Of Angels

Unbelievably, Teramaze went a whole year without releasing an album. However, that streak was broken an entire 1 day later.

I mused on the impressively frequent output of Australian prog outfit Teramaze last October when they released And The Beauty They Perceive, the third lockdown album summoned up by Dean Wells and the latest ensemble comprising his long-running yet previously sporadic project. That review was published on the album’s release date, 5 October 2021; the next Teramaze album dropped on 6 October 2022, and alerted to me the alarming reality that in the year since I published what was review number 200 for me on the site, I have managed to post a further 158 reviews prior to this one. Maybe I see a kindred spirit in Teramaze in terms of productivity, and that’s why I’m now writing my fifth review of one of their records, all of which I’ve enjoyed to varying degrees. Of those albums, however, Flight Of The Wounded is perhaps the one that’s made the least impression on me thus far.

It starts off promisingly enough with the 10-minute title track; one of Teramaze’s clearest strengths that has emerged across these past few albums is their ability to write compelling long songs. Even when taking the 25-minute odyssey (and, in my eyes, genuine modern prog-metal masterpiece) “Sorella Minore” out of the equation, there’s been several songs flirting with or exceeding the 10-minute mark on the lockdown records, and they were typically among the strongest songs on each album. While “Flight Of The Wounded” doesn’t have the engrossing emotion of “Head Of A King” or “This Is Not A Drill”, it has a joyous brightness to it while also hitting some resonant notes vocally and instrumentally. This is the fourth album with the same 4-piece line-up, including Wells continuing as lead vocalist, and it’s a role that he’s moved into seamlessly, possessing a tone and range that works very nicely with the band’s current music.

Beyond “Flight Of The Wounded”, however, the record is perhaps lacking on some fronts. Teramaze have certainly featured quite a few ballad-esque and ‘poppy’, for lack of a better word, tracks on the slower side of the tempo spectrum across the lockdown records, but the proportion of the tracklist that is comprised by these songs here feels higher than normal; whether that's actually the case, I'm not entirely sure, but they certainly make their presence more strongly felt. Considering that this is a prog album, there is quite a lot of this album that doesn’t really feel proggy, which is fine, except that every song here is over 5 minutes long. In some instances, the extended length is a result of mid-song detours into more typical prog-metal instrumental meandering, but the knock-on effect is that a few songs of middling impact start to overstay their welcome.

This is particularly notable in the three-song stretch immediately following the title track; the dreamy “Gold”, soft synth-heavy “The Thieves Are Out” and semi-piano ballad “Until The Lights”, together as a sequence, cause some of my enthusiasm for the album to peter, particularly the overly long piano-only first half of “Until The Lights”. Questionable song/album length and an overabundance of slower, softer material were reservations I had with I Wonder and Are We Soldiers, but I find them influencing my overall opinion more strongly with Flight Of The Wounded.

Before the record runs risk of really losing momentum, “Ticket To The Next Apocalypse” brings back some of the heaviness and progginess, with a sound that takes me back to 2019’s Are We Soldiers. On I Wonder, one of the songs featured Becoming The Archetype’s Jason Wisdom as an extreme vocal cameo; I don’t see anyone outside of the core 4 members credited as a musician on this album, so I can only assume that the harsh vocals on “Ticket To The Next Apocalypse” are performed by Wells. If they are, kudos for branching out into different vocal styles, but they’re not as relatively refined as his clean singing. Beyond this song, “For The Thrill” has a nice passionate chorus (but does perhaps overrun as a song) and “Battle” is probably one of the most effective and enjoyable attempts at a straightforward cut such as this by the band. Closing song “In The Ruins Of Angels” maintains the imperfect nature of the record as a whole, moving between softer emotive sections and more technical prog without ever entirely clicking for me, in sharp contrast to the emphatic ending that “Head Of A King” gave And The Beauty They Perceive.

Ultimately, I do still like this album, but as much as I enjoy Wells’ singing and the band’s instrumentation, and those do combine here to give some pleasant and memorable sections, the album as a whole doesn’t deliver for me, as a whole or on a song-by-song basis, at the level that the two records the band released last year did. It’s a pleasant addition to the rapidly growing discography of Teramaze, but assuming that future records continue to come at this rate, I suspect it may not take pride of place in said discography as time goes on and hopefully stronger albums follow.