Random Album Review - Into the Electric Castle by Ayreon

[Repost From Old Site]
Progressive rock is a tricky business, and a hard sell even in it's prime.  Most rock listeners like rock music because it does a lot with very little (though I doubt they are aware they like it for this reason).  It's a very expressive music, but it requires no great deal of attention or concentration to enjoy.  The best rock music hits you on a visceral level; it gets in your bones long before it reaches your brain.
Not so with progressive rock.  It aims straight for the brain, and it demands almost infinite patience to really appreciate all a particular composition has to offer.  Prog rock, from an analytic standpoint, has a lot more in common with classical than rock.  The concepts are generally larger, or explored more thoroughly, and the music is much more intricate.  Though this demands much from the listener, it also offers more; the ideas that can be expressed are that much bigger.  Good prog rock is like watching a movie montage in your imagination.
But there is such a thing as music that is overwrought.  Occasionally, an artist will come up with a fairly simple idea or story and wrap it up in hours of impossibly dense guitar noodling and so many time-signature shifts it's hard to call the result music.
Such is the case with the album Into the Electric Castle  by Ayreon.  It's the case with all their work, unfortunately, but nowhere was it made clearer than on this album.  Like so many terrible bands in this world, Ayreon is a revolving door cast of musicians built around the ego of a single (admittedly talented) musician.  Ayreon is one of a growing constellation of projects revolving around Arjen A. Lucassen.  He plays nearly every instrument on all of his projects, and the "bands" really only exist so that he can take his projects on tour.  Sometimes this formula works, as it did for Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails) and Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age).  In Lucassen's case, however, the ambition far outshines the execution.
Into the Electric Castle is a 160 minute double-cd concept piece.  All of Ayreon's albums are.  Keep in mind that the hardiest of human attention spans averages about 30 minutes for single-sense stimulation.  The story is about a handful of people from various eras in human history brought together in a mysterious alternate dimension to go on an adventure together, and guess where they're headed?  That's right, Into the Electric Castle. 
If that doesn't sound hack-ish enough already, Try some of the lyrics on for size:
Welcome! You have entered the cranial vistas of psychogenesis. This is the place of no-time and
no-space. Do not be afraid for I am merely the vocal manifestation of your eternal dreams. I am
as water, as air - like breath itself. Do not be afraid.
Look around, but linger not. Where I lead you will follow. Mark these words well. Ignite my
anger with your delay and punishments will come your way.
You are eight souls of the flesh, chosen from different eras ancient and modern. The trivia of
your mortal lives is unimportant to me... Indeed, some may die...
You have a task: to release yourselves from this Web of Wisdom, this knotted Maze of Delirium,
you must enter the nuclear portals of the Electric Castle!
This is a brief spoken word piece that begins the journey.  If you don't think that sounds corny, then leave this page and never come back.
I'm a sci-fi nerd.  I find it easy to suspend my disbelief.  I find it even easier to accept flights of pseudo-scientific fancy and impossible gadgeteering, but only if there's a point to it.  Only if there's some core of human expression, literary commentary or character development wrapped up in the cheap devices of the genre.
Ayreon forgoes these for the sake of sheer immensity.  The point here seems to be only to stretch the journey of the protagonists so that it will cover all 160 minutes.  One event doesn't really lead to another.  No single character seems to grow or develop as a result of the events of the plot.  And the "twist" at the end goes from vague to opaque.
The music, while an amazing display of technical ability, utterly fails to live up to the intended level of drama.  It makes adequate room for the well delivered vocals, and it peppers the songs with searing hot instrumental solos.  Unfortunately not a single second of it is memorable.  I'm sure there are people who could sing along to music like this, but only after deliberately taking the time to memorize it.  It's a meandering, hook-less mishmash of angular prog instumentals and soaring, Opeth-aping heavy metal chord progressions.  If "Stairway to Heaven" is like reading the Brothers Grimm, Into The Electric Castle is like reading a law school textbook.
Lucassen is so good at so many instruments that coming up with riffs is like taking a dump for him.  The problem is that he tries to write a rock opera around every one.  It's exhausting, and the payoff is a shoddily slapped together, pointless story.
The single worst thing about this album, for me, is that the story is nearly identical to one I tried to write.  In college I spent countless hours interweaving several short stories in an attempt to craft a novel about several protagonists who are taken to a mysterious alternate dimension.  After I listened to all 160 minutes of Into the Electric Castle in utter disbelief, I realized what a huge bullet I had dodged.  Not only had someone beaten me to it, but it was BAD.  I'm ever thankful that I wised up and scrapped the thing.  Who wants to read or listen for an eternity in order to receive at best, a jumbled, incoherent moral insisting that humanity is innately flawed?