Band: Torman Maxt Album: The Problem of Pain Part I Label: Mars Hill Records Rating: 5/10 Website: http://www.tormanmaxt.com BUY NOW!

Torman Maxt is a progressive rock trio made up entirely of three brothers. The Massaro brothers are based in Florida. The band is making Christian rock in the style of Rush, Dream Theater with some rock influence from The Who and Led Zeppelin. The previous album; "the foolishness of god" explored concepts to do with belief in Jesus. The band has continued the Christian theology lesson on this album. This time the band is looking into the book of Job. On the back of the album is a quote from C.S. Lewis, "If God were good, he would wish to make his creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty, he would be able to do what he wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness or power or both." This gives you an example of the basic issue discussed in this album. For those of you who haven't been attending Sunday school recently; the book of Job is the story in the bible which tries to explain the existence of evil in the world and reconcile this with the existence of God. That's putting it in quite basic terms, but it will suffice for this review. While this is an interesting theological subject I'm not too keen on having it in my music. I am an atheist and can do without having Christianity forced on me in so strong a way, so the lyrical subject matter of this album is a turn off for me. The music itself is pleasant. You can happily leave it on as background music and get on with something else. It starts off with an instrumental overture. Right from the start I'm reminded of Rush and their influence is present through the rest of the album. There are other influences present on the album, some of the riffs remind me of Led Zeppelin and other remind of The Who, specifically ones from "Tommy". It also has a similar sort of format to "Tommy" with the overture and it being a concept album. At times the voice does remind me Roger Daltrey, but mainly the Torman Maxt vocals follow the style of Geddy Lee of Rush. The songs are all quite nice, but there is a tendency for them all to blur together as they all sound pretty similar. This is kind of to be expected from a concept album, but it doesn't help hold your attention. The band has been labelled as prog, which I always have problems with if the band isn't actually doing something new. The whole idea of prog is to be progressive and this just doesn't do that. It just reworks albums that have already been done previously. This combined with the subject matter made this a bit disappointing. The subject matter may appeal to you, which is why I mentioned it in a bit of detail, as many other people I'm sure would really like this. Its just not for me. Joshua Johnson http://www.myspace.com/children_of_the_sabbath Back to Reviews