MetalProgressive Rock
30 June 2026
“Critical Minutiae” runs ten minutes and eight seconds and makes the best case for “Mortal Heirloom”: crunchy riffs that open out into acoustic guitar and atmospheric keyboards, with a vocal melody unfolding in harmony above them. One person did all of it. Odd Logic is Sean Thompson, from Tacoma, Washington, who plays guitars, bass and keyboards and sings, with Pete Hanson on drums as he has been for years. Six tracks, forty-three minutes, none under six.
Seven years without new material haven’t felt like it, because Thompson hasn’t stopped: “Last Watch Of The Nightingale” came out in 2019, and since then he has put out Nothing In Writing, his lighter neo-prog outlet, and The Triton Project, an eighty-five-minute concept piece written with the Thai composer Tanpawat Suttipong. What returns here is the old repertoire, melodic progressive metal in the Dream Theater and Fates Warning line, and the decision to sing it in the smoother register — the one that invites comparisons with Ted Leonard — which is what keeps the melodies sitting above the riffs. The delicate opening of “Unequal Lies” is where that choice pays off best.
It’s also where the reservation shows up. The six tracks are built in much the same way, restrained entrance, riff, harmonised chorus, back to the start, and the album reaches forty-three minutes without ever leaving that mid-heavy band. This is not an immediate record: the songs need several passes before they separate from one another, which in an album of six is a lot to ask of a first listen. Anyone who knows “Penny For Your Thoughts”, from 2016, will recognise the abrupt shifts in intensity; anyone who doesn’t will take a while to find them.
Rating: 7.6/10
Text by Roger Estivill