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You have to hand it to Trent Gardner for bringing together another stellar cast of musicians for his second "Explorer's Club" effort, titled, "Raising the Mammoth." Between this project, and the "Leonardo -- The Absolute Man" album he helmed last year, Gardner has been busy with these side projects, but he keeps managing to rope his friends in to help out. The usual suspects, such as Terry Bozzio, James Labrie (Dream Theater) and Gary Wehrkamp (Shadow Gallery) are here, but this time Gardner also went outside the usual Magna Carta/prog metal circles to bring in Marty Friedman, the ex-Megadeth axe slinger, to spice things up.

The result, well, it depends on a number of things, including whether you're a fan of Gardner's music, whether you're a progressive rock fan in general, and whether you can handle self-indulgent music, whatever the form may be. If you don't fit into any of these categories, "Raising the Mammoth" isn't the album for you.

Then again, even if you do fit all three categories, this disc might challenge your attention. Even though there are only two official songs on the disc, Gardner saw fit to assign one track to each shift in the music. Given the fact that this is, after all, a progressive, experimental side project of an album, there are plenty of changes going on throughout "Raising the Mammoth." 44 of them, in fact, which makes this one album never to play in "shuffle" mode. 

The two songs are conveniently titled "Raising the Mammoth 1" and "Raising the Mammoth 2." The former is broken into three section, each of which are significantly different from one another, as well as distinct from "Raising the Mammoth 2", essentially yielding 4 different flavors stirred up in Gardner's musical kitchen. Overall, Gardner has scaled back the metal-edge that marked its first edition of the "Explorers Club", to feature a more experimental progressive rock sound. Among the shifting flavors on this, a few things do remain constant, including Terry Bozzio's solid drum work, and a highly developed appreciation for the work of one Keith Emerson that is readily apparent on this disc. Gardner is an admitted fan of Emerson, and "ELP", and it shows on everything he's done to date, and "Raising the Mammoth" is no exception.

That said, it really isn't fair to pigeonhole "Explorers Club" into any one category. For one thing, there isn't any band concept at play on this disc -- it's just a bunch of great musicians going to town on Trent Gardner's songwriting. The aforementioned Marty Friedman gets things started on the first segment, "Passage to Paralysis," with a characteristic, shred-edged solo early in the song, which describes the protagonist's slide into a mental wasteland, "I'm lost in my drama's tears/been that way for years/and I can't tell if it's real or fiction/'cause I can't see the forest for the trees."

"Broad Decay" finds the guy at rock bottom, unable to find hope within himself, or in the institutions that supposedly exist for our benefit, "Broad decay, it's all around us/flowing forth in rich abundance/Church and State combined against us." Set against, Gardner's moody musical landscape, Steve Walsh's expressive vocals really shine in this piece.

"Vertebrates" brings things to a head, as Gardner and James Labrie trade vocal lines against a stark acoustic background, "You robbed me of a chance to engage you on the same page/Now all I bear is lies/No wonder I can't reach you." The redemption, such that it is, comes with a simple declaration of a guy who is finally confronting his demons, "I'd like to speak the truth, if you don't mind/you need to hear this straight, if you don't mind," Once that's out of the way, the song ends in the type of prog-metal listeners of the first "Explorers Club" project might have expected when they picked up this album.

The last piece on the disc is longest on the CD, clocking in at easily over 20 minutes of instrumental progressive masturbation. Subtitled "Giganthopiticus" or, alternately, "Prog-O-Rama," it takes the love-it-or-hate-it nature of this CD to a whole another level. Fans of prog, or of Gardner might dig this smoothly shifting experiment in songcraft. The piece features bits recalling the prog greats of yore -- "Genesis", "Jethro Tull", and "ELP" -- as it weaves in and out of straight prog, fusion and metal territories. It's meant to be a free-form exploration of music, and as that it succeeds magnificently. In doing so, however, Gardner's painted himself into a prog niche that severely restricts commercial possibilities. "Raising the Mammoth" is a decent album for what it attempts to do, but it's not one I'd recommend most of my friends to go and pick up.