Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

If you can have the best of both worlds, then why not seek out more than one flavour of jam to put on your toast, love with both intensity and feeling and if all works for you across the board, then meld the forces of the Progressive and the crash of symbolic Metal to the point where the boiling cauldron of the instantly creative overflows and destroys the path of ignorance with first class precision. For this once thought conceptual distorted force, only dared to be breached by the timeless Iron Maiden in Seventh Son of a Seventh Son or in the incomparable Queensryche, has more than come of age since those tentative steps.

Greece’s powerhouse of the genre Distorted Force may have started out as one the groups that you would have gone to see perform the searing memories of other Heavy Metal acts that made audiences tightly wrapped in the arms of nostalgia, but as Time has weighed the century up and found it wanting in stature, Distorted Force has become a band in which you could well argue holds its roots and its outlook fully in the camp of the British Progressive scene and the physical attributes of the Metal that saved the minds and emotions of thousands of impressionable music fans.

In their new album, Curves of A Sidereal Cosmos, Spiros Emmanouildis, Nikos Felekis, Nikos Hatiigogos, Marios Ionnidis, Thanos Pallidis and Markos Diamantopoulos converge ready to take the crowd and the newly interested on a voyage of self-discovery, an Odyssey-like performance in which new realms are explored as the Progressive element fuses intangibly with the Metal, like a hybrid machine, all glowing metallic shell, muscular and powerful, but with the agility of the story-teller woven through its pores and the heart of poet.

The tracks on the album Barrow’s of Doom, Dreamworld’s Forest, the album title track, Curves of A Sidereal Cosmos, Tumulus and Raven are not just muscular, they crack the listener’s mind and overthrow the negative allusion that some have when thinking of the concept album, this Homer like scribe journey is to be admired fully.

Curves of A Sidereal Cosmos is enthralling, a mighty step in the band’s evolution and one that paves the way to a different level of song-writing.

Ian D. Hall