For some reason, this is the third concept album to emerge from Lion Music in a matter of weeks. Are these sort of albums back in fashion again, and I didn't get the memo? Now we have Shadrane, a project originated by keyboard player Vivien Lalu and guitarist Joop Wolters, and incorporating the Bissonette brothers, Matt and Greg (well known for their work with Steve Vai and Joe Satriani) as the rhythm section.

As concept albums go this is a more complicated example than usual, as, whilst the songs are all tied into the story, they're not arranged in chronological order. The project uses a number of guest musicians and different singers, although the bulk of the vocal duties are handled by the ever reliable Goran Edman who puts in his usual fine performance, although Bjorn Jansson, of Beyond Twilight, makes a brief but excellent contribution, particularly on the track 'Morpheus', where at times he sounds uncannily like Jorn Lande. There's also some fine guitar work from Marco Sfogli, who takes a lot of the solos on the album.

The songs are comparatively short and sharp for this type of release mostly clocking around the 4-5 minute mark, no 12-minute magnum opus centrepiece track here and, In general at least, for a prog metal opus they also benefit from being pretty accessible. The highlights are the afore-mentioned 'Morpheus' and the instrumental 'Betrayal' which has a scorching riff but too many of the songs tend to run into each other and, if you're not trying to follow the story, the music isn't quite strong enough to carry the album on its own. What doesn't help is the fact that the band have taken an uneasy middle ground between having their own permanent vocalist and using guests. Not having their own singer has perhaps robbed them of their own sound or identity and the guest singers, given that they aren't playing specific roles as on say an Ayreon album, don't really seem to add anything to proceedings.

'Temporal' is an enjoyable enough listen, but apart from some excellent performances by Edman and Sfogli, there's nothing to make the album stand out, nothing to make you go 'Damn, that's good'. There's really not enough to make it stand out from the pack. Some albums knock you out when you first hear them, others take more time to sink in and be appreciated but  even after numerous play throughs I'm afraid 'Temporal' doesn't get better than OK.