This is another progressive metal band from USA. Freewill is a power trio featuring Tom Clark; vocals, keyboards, and drums, Chad Heyroth; guitars and Paul Balakars; guitars and additional musician Jason Peck on bass. They were officially formed back in 1993 and immediately started working on original material, which resulted in their first demo in 1994. This self-titled demo, which contained eight songs, sold out its pressing and four years later, in 1998, their debut cd "Progressive regression" was released.

The cd has 7 songs and a total running time of 61 minutes. The cd kicks off with "Indifference", a semi- progressive song with good melody line and a good chorus. The song is based around twin guitar attack of Heyroth and Balakars, backed by acoustic guitars. The vocals of Tom Clark is very good, mid- register, soft and pleasant. All songs are focused around the twin guitars and the vocals of Clark. The variation within each song is good, with many instrumental parts, changing song structures, and while the music is fairly progressive, the songs are not overly complex. On most songs the melody lines are very good and prepared thoroughly. The same can be said about the chouses, take tack three "The storm" for instance, which has a catchy, accessible, and melodic chorus.

While it`s not easy to make any comparisons to this band, the music is coming across as powerprog and straight prog metal, with the emphasis on the guitars. The keys is pretty much in the background all the time, and is sometimes hard to notice at all. While the music and songwriting is very good, the same can`t be said about the production, and that`s what hold the cd back. Although I have heard a lot of cds which sounds worse than this cd, the production lacks power, depth and punch, resulting in a rather flat drum sound and the guitars lacks both power and punch, which is sorely missed. It`s not that the sound is so bad that I can`t enjoy this disc, because I really did, but the absence of power and depth in production is clearly missed. On top of that, the playing is on a few occasions out of synch, the drums is most noticeable.

As they are an indy band and has produced the cd themselves, they can to some extent be justified for the poor sound, but they really should have done something with the parts that are out of synch. Having said this, I would still recommend the cd for die- hard fans of the prog metal genre. The cd offers some great long progressive songs which are very good, and if you can stand the production, you will probably enjoy the disc a lot. Freewill is a very promising and talented band indeed, there`s no doubt about that. With the right production and sufficient time in studio, the next cd could be killer. I rate this cd to 3 ½ out of 5 points.