Here's what I hate about "Journey to Infinity": everything. To begin to describe how unbelievably tedious and vapid this is would require listening to Soul of Steel's second album once more, and that would require about twelve pots of coffee and a kick in the nuts every fifteen minutes. Since I'm not in the mood to have my testicles squashed and my heart palpitate, I'll say that this album teeters on the thin line between terminal inadequacy and near-comical embarrassment, often blurring the line between its two areas of expertise. Soul of Steel is an Italian power/progressive metal squad, sharing the same nationality as groups like Rhapsody of Fire and countless others that have proven not to be totally inept while doing this blueprint. Musically they aren't far from the tree from which they fell, yet they somehow manage to be the most stagnant and uneventful band on the face of the planet. Soul of Steel sounds like a spiritual combination of Dream Theater, Symphony X, and Rhapsody of Fire all caged together. Keyboards, clean vocals, guitar solos, crunchy riffs, elegant interludes, kick-the-dead-horse-again choruses, and enough cheese to fill the Grand Canyon are the cogs that make this machine turn. Pretty standard stuff for a power/progressive metal band from Italy. The only problem stemming from this observation is how horribly awkward and bloated Soul of Steel manages to appear, writing tunes that are so directionless and without purpose that given an option between this and a venue featuring Machine Head tribute groups, the latter is given brief consideration. They spend the whole record sleepwalking through dire, snobbish slabs of half-assed power metal in its most generic and unbearable form, also throwing in an overabundance of guitar and keyboard solos that come off as oversaturated and just unnecessary. Some of the songs also end abruptly despite their lengths, which is really interesting, because it takes a lot—and I mean A LOT—of screwing around to fatten up a release to the point of exhaustion yet somehow leave its pieces feeling bare and starved.
On "Through the Gates of Heaven," Soul of Steel crawls through their whole shindig for several minutes, and then they lurch into a new section that ends the whole song mere seconds after its final part begins. How the hell does that happen? It's terrible to begin with, but at least it'd have had a sense of completion if they would've just milked it entirely. Other than the nonsense Soul of Steel tries to recycle throughout this record's torturous running time, the faction focuses on quasi-ballads that are seemingly everywhere. Sappy, insipid, pointless, boneheaded—use a thesaurus and find other words that apply. The worst of the worst, though, is the band's singer, who has no business doing any sort of vocal work in any dimension not completely overrun by sh*t-smearing idiots. Granted, a lot of vocalists in this niche aren't magical, but they at least sound capable in their surroundings—not this guy. He often mumbles into the microphone, and he fails to hit high notes of any sort and ends up sounding hilariously tired. On top of that, he constantly uses the same register and has no versatility at all. Soul of Steel pretty much has an Italian Ben Stein leading its parade of redundancy.
"Journey to Infinity" continues running into walls for SEVENTY-TWO minutes, which includes an acoustic version of "Last Desire," the second-to-last song on the album. The hell is the point? I've been unable to sit through the whole ordeal in its entirety; it's just too mundane and boring to experience from end to end. Some parts are listenable, but they're still savagely mediocre and reek of something a superior faction would throw away entirely, which speaks leaps and bounds about how bad this really is. "Journey to Infinity" feels more like a voyage into the depths of apathy; the bowels of a group that knows how to sound like a fish out of water and nothing else. Other than watching Soul of Steel flop around aimlessly, "Journey to Infinity" holds no purpose whatsoever.