‘70s progressive rock lives in the hearts of Brooklyn, NY's
Titan, whose sophomore long-player, 2010's
Sweet Dreams, pays unabashed tribute to many a dinosaur band responsible for carving its claws in vinyl, not tar pits, so many decades ago. Jumping right in with all four trunk-like legs, the album's pace-setting title track is a whirling dervish of dueling guitar and keyboards piped straight from the early ‘70s via
Deep Purple and
Uriah Heep, its only obvious contemporary parallel being San Francisco's
Hammers of Misfortune or Portland's
Danava. But the aptly named "Synthasaurs" briefly cools the engines with the more fluid fossil fuel of early
Kansas,
Styx, and
Journey, before the members of
Titan allow themselves to stampede into another batch of puny mammal-crushing prog epics. There's "Wooded Altar Beyond the Wander," which boasts the album's only (altogether brief and really quite spotty) vocal cameo; "Highlands of Orick" which, frankly, goes everywhere and absolutely nowhere over the course of about 1.5 million notes strewn all over the place; and there's the inspired title "Maximum Soberdrive," which pretty much carries on as before, but also broaches
Hawkwind-styled space rock atmospherics to deliver far more dramatic and memorable results. All of which essentially means that
Titan's impressive instrumental display ultimately amounts to a lot of hyperactive showboating, but offers tenuously little in the way of originality or even versatility, once all that asteroid dust begins to settle. Were it not for the incredible scarcity of bands of this ilk operating in 2010 (come to think of it, the last confirmed sighting may have come with the underrated Mystick Krewe of Clearlight, some ten years prior),
Titan would have even less to bank on. But, as it stands,
Sweet Dreams will surely appeal to a very thin but dedicated slice of heavy prog rock fanatics, who own season passes to this particular natural history museum. ~ Eduardo Rivadavia