First of all, I have to clearly state that I am a huge of Arjen Lucassen's works; yes I enjoyed the STREAM OF PASSION debut album, the excellent STAR ONE release and of course the 6 AYREON concepts. 01011001 is his seventh science fiction story that Arjen has created with his music.
As you probably know Arjen is into creating entire worlds (and planetary systems) with his music that has strong bonds with the sound of late 70s . In every AYREON album there is a huge guest list with singers and instrumentalists that play a specific role in Arjen's story. If you at least familiar to AYREON then you should already have read Arjen's interview to the METAL TEMPLE where he explained the story behind the enigmatic title. I will not bore you to death by talking about the story itself because you can read by yourself from the lyric notes.
What about the music in 01011001? Well, I think that it is better than The Human Equation in terms of heaviness and of course music diversity; it is funny though, to talk about music diversity in a AYREON album since it is well know that Arjen likes to mix and experiment a lot with different music styles. This time Arjen went deeper and played with different and conflicting emotions; the industrial almost dark atmosphere found in songs like The Unnatural Selection or the Age Of Shadows is definitely a new element here. I was happy to have in a single album some singers that I believe belong to the creme de la cream of the Heavy Metal's modern history; Anneke van Giersbergen, Simone Simons, Jorn Lande and Tom Englund are some of those. Of course, I can not forget the already known voices of Hansi Kursch, Bob Catley and Steve Lee.
The album comes in two CDs and need additional spins to grow and mature in your mind; I can assure you that after every listening session you'll discover something new and definitely interesting. This tall guy loves making music and this is shown and proven in every AYREON album. Personally, I think this is the definition of Progressive Metal that many bands have already forgotten; and that is experimenting, exploring new musical territories and why not creating new sounds.
Songs that made me push the replay button additional times are: the melodic River Of Time (you'll be whistling the melody after the very first listening), the science fiction E=MC2 (Nuclear Physics rules), the epic The Sixth Extinction where all the singers lend their voices and last but not least the groovy Age Of Shadows. Some additional credit deserves the ballad Web Of Lies where the beautiful Simone sings besides Phideaux Xavier with an mostly warm voice accompanied by an acoustic guitar and a violin; this is excellent work guys!
Well, I could go on forever writing my thoughts about this album and Greg (a.k.a. Evil Editor) would eventually apply the delete button several times to save you from eternal boredom. So, if you like music exploration then don't waste anymore time and get this album to discover more than those I wrote about in the above lines.
PS: My rating is not 10/10 because there will be another AYREON in the future...