Threshold – The Ravages of Time

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InsideOut Music
Produced by Karl Groom

After 19 years (why not wait for 20 next year?) England’s finest progressive metal band, and one the country’s finest bands full-stop, is to release a double-CD, 20-track best of collection through their old label, InsideOut.

Threshold started out on GEP Records with their first four albums, and then joined InsideOut for 2001′s Hypothetical, with whom they remained for five years. In 2001 InsideOut acquired and reissued the frist three albums from GEP with bonus tracks, with the fourth, Clone, still to come, therefore meaning they have control of the band’s entire catalogue prior to new album Dead Reckoning, which is on Nuclear Blast. Somewhat surprising, then, that Nuclear Blast have allowed InsideOut to include the unreleased radio edits of Slipstream and Pilot In The Sky of Dreams from the new album, especially when those are the two most popular songs from that record and they would surely be wanting that popularity to generate sails of the record itself while it’s still current.

Anyway, any best of compilation of Threshold material is guaranteed to be essential listening, such is the unrivalled consistency of their output. Fans all have their favourites, and with such a large body of work a compilation is never going to please everyone (indeed many remain slightly bemused at the absence of tracks like Long Way Home and Part of The Chaos), but ultimately it’s impossible to go wrong. All of the tracks included were selected by the band, who were involved with the production of the collection from start to finish, and represent their entire career.

Threshold’s seminal first three albums saw two different singers front the band (Damian Wilson and Glynn Morgan), then the next five all featured the same front-man, Andrew “Mac” McDermott. It is therefore fair that of the 20 songs in this set, 13 are from Mac-fronted albums and seven are shared between the other two (five Wilson, two Morgan); but it’s slightly confusing that the discs are the wrong way round, with the most recent songs on disc one and the GEP-album tracks on disc two. Hard hitting live favourites like Phenomenon, Mission Profile, Oceanbound and Light And Space sit alongside longer, progressive tracks like Eat The Unicorn, Ravages of Time and Sanity’s End to present an accurate cross-section of the band’s music, but the lack of anything new or unreleased (save a couple of radio edits) will put off some existing fans from adding this to their collection.

Keyboard player Richard West has previously stated that with 2007 being such a busy year for the band with a new album, line-up changes and touring, they didn’t have enough time to write and record any new songs for this compilation. And because of their two direct-to-fan rarity releases, Decadent and Replica, and the InsideOut reissues of their first three albums, they didn’t really have any rare tracks left to include here.

However, given recent developments with the line-up (Wilson stepping in to replace Mac until the end of the year, with anything beyond that not yet decided) I would have liked to see the release of this perhaps delayed slightly to facilitate the recording and mixing of a couple of live Mac-era songs with Wilson on vocals. That would likely have been enough to satisfy most existing Threshold fans, and wouldn’t have required the time it takes to write and record new material, just a bit of mixing time.

Most fans will add it to their collection anyway, for completeness sake, and everyone else at all interested in either progressive music or heavy music in general with real, talented singers, needs this collection.

“ essential ”

Tracklist:
Disc 1 – Slipstream (radio edit) / Light And Space / Mission Profile / Falling Away / Ravages Of Time / Phenomenon / Pressure (radio edit) / Fragmentation / Oceanbound / Art Of Reason / Pilot In The Sky Of Dreams (radio edit)
Disc 2 – Latent Dream / Tension of Souls / Eat The Unicorn / Consume To Live / Innocent / Exposed (radio edit) / Sanity’s End / The Whispering / Voyager II

Written by Andy Lye
More: Compilation Albums, Progressive, Threshold