Maybe I'll get a lot of critical comments about this album being placed in a progressive review list, but in my opinion they will only come from people who don't really understand the true meaning of progressiveness. In prog everything is possible, whether you like it or not is a matter of personal taste. Tiamat has started as an uninteresting black metal band, jumped on the bandwagon of gothic metal in the mid-nineties and finished (up until now) with an album that might be one of the directions prog will be going in the next millenium. Of course some bands will be using more electronic influences in their music then (my prophecy for two thousand and something is Dream Theater going slightly techno), and if they do it in the way Tiamat has done it, it's OK by me. This album has been completely composed and pre-produced by bandleader Johan Edlund. The other band members came in later. It's a very emotional and confronting album about his life and feelings, and when you can imagine life not always going as you want it to go, the soundtrack of his life might not be that different from yours sometimes. The music is hard to describe (you could try something like gothic-trance-progrock/ metal, but that's a lot of crap), but don't worry about the instrumentation, a lot of guitars (electric and acoustic) are used next to the more "non-prog" instruments and sounds. The singing is perfectly fitting and I've discovered that every now and then it's nice to wander around in this deeper kind of slumber. Try it before you buy it, if you like it, it will be a friend forever, guaranteed!