EXPLORER’S CLUB

“Raising the Mammoth”
(Magna Carta, 2002)  

 Project Leader:
Trent Gardner: keyboards and voice.

Guests:
Steve Walsh, James LaBrie: voice.
Marty Friedman, Kerry Livgren, Gary Wehrkamp: guitars.
Mark Robertson, Gary Wehrkamp: keyboards.
Terry Bozzio: drums, percussion.
John Myung: bass.

Explorer's Club is the name of a lateral project organized by the leader of the North American band Magellan, the vocalist/keyboardist/ trombonist Trent Gardner. Explorer's Club's first work, “Age of Impact”, it dates of 1998, and it had an orientation bowed preferably to the progressive metal. Guitarist John Petrucci and the drummer Terry Bozzio (showing with great fierceness their side more rocker) they were in that occasion the undeniable main characters of the one it assembles instrumental. With everything we were not few those that, without questioning the it was worth of the musicians involved in the first project, we notice that the jams excess affected to the focus of the topics and it was not able to hide a certain lack of consistency in the compositions. 

Fortunately, this factor was revised and corrected by Gardner in this second opportunity. Having the services of Bozzio and LaBrie again, amen of other collaborators coming from Kansas, Dream Theater, Shadow Gallery, Cairo, and even Megadeth!, Explorer's Club is able to balance the typical melodic splendor of the symphonic one and the most overwhelming energy in the rock successfully. The composition work is better structured, that which doesn't prevent that the alone of guitar and synthesizer arise here and there to shine and to impress the listener, but always conserving the integrity of the melody. The predominant presence of the keyboards help in an effective way to maintain a firmly orchestral tone along the disk. 

They are two the extensive topics included in this disk, “Raising the Mammoth 1” and “Raising the Mammoth 2”, each one of them skirting the stocking hour of duration. The first one consists in turn of three blocks: “Passage to Paralysis”, the more rockero of the three, in the one which the vocal protagonism Walsh assumes it who in spite of being far from the moments of glory of Kansas, he still knows as transmitting the feeling of the lyrical ones amid the implacable instrumental arsenal firmly sustained by the double rhythmic Bozzio-Myung; “Broad Decay”, it has a more rested compass and it shows a more serene and more introspective sound climate, erecting you like an effective symphonic semi-ballad, also with Walsh like vocal main character; lastly, “Vertebrates” it explores for more ethereal atmospheres of keyboard on a base of I rake of acoustic guitar while LaBrie exhibits the subtlest dimension in its powerful vocal range, concluding with a section syncopated rockera, subtly dismal. “Raising the Mammoth 2” it is an extensive one instrumental in the one that all the virtues and varied resources of the net symphonic tradition are conjugated, with clear inheritances of ELP, Yes, Rick Wakeman, Kansas, more some added seasons of the progressive metal, elements that have always characterized to the sound of Magellan. 

In sum, a quite compact and very even work that will make the delights of the followers of the symphonic contemporary, as well as of many nostalgic “hopeless” of the progressive one classic.

César Inca