Manilla Road to the World - Part 2: Dreams of Eschaton/Epilogue (Crystal Logic)

Crystal Logic is Manilla Road's third album and starts to show the true style of the band moving away from the progressive rock and space rock elements that were present previously. Crystal Logic also gave the band the most recognition they ever received throughout their career with the hit song Necropolis. There was even a song that made a radio-friendly attempt which only ended up as being a song that sticks out like a sore thumb in the album and would have been better off as a bonus track. Despite that, it's still a decent song but the rest of the songs are better by far.

Crystal Logic contains tempo changing tracks such as The Riddle Master and The Ram to add a lot of interest to the songs as well as the title track that contains a thrashy feel to it and has even had the same riff used by several thrash metal bands. The absolute jawdropping moment has to be the album closer Dreams of Eschaton which happens to be today's Manilla Roadkill song. Crystal Logic is the most accessible Manilla Road album and is definitely an album worth picking. The only flaw that can be found in the whole album is the placement of Feeling Free Again.

Dreams of Eschaton is the 12 minute album closer that certainly deserves to be described as epic. The song starts off with an acoustic folk-ish intro where the lyrics speak of a vision of a nuclear apocalypse. Just after two minutes in, the song changes to heavy riffages and the lyrics describe the true chaos of the apocalypse where the antichrist will soon rise up and destroy everything. The lyrics even have a bizarre mix of Ragnarok of King Arthur but if everything is going to hell, you'd expect chaos to happen. The third section of the song at six minutes in is an instrumental section with an awesomely song that gradually fades out to the album's epilogue.

Although the epilogue track was originally an individual track (not heard on the embedded video), the song transition from Dreams of Eschaton to the ending flows so well that merging the two tracks together on the re-release makes a lot of sense. The epilogue track is somewhat scary with the piano and the screaming you hear right at the end but again, this is concluding a song that pictures the end of the world and the screams at the apocalypse are to be expected. Overall, Dreams of Eschaton is an excellent song in Crystal Logic and if the world is about to end, this should be the last song to be listened to before it all goes.