As I pulled away from the train station, I turned on the radio and flicked the Scan button. When the numbers stopped, the DJ's voice was just dying away, and the next song was starting. It took a few bars before I could mentally extrapolate from the intro far enough to remember which Journey song it was, but I recognized Jonathan Cain's clanging alternate-hand piano cadence and Neal Schon's spirograph guitar blur immediately. I was never a Journey fan as a kid, and still haven't bought any of their records, but they were a constant radio presence during my adolescence, and for a few moments, speeding down a minor Rhode Island highway, I am able to conflate associative nostalgia with actual devotion. And then Steve Perry starts singing, and I remember which song this is ("Don't Stop Believin'", from Escape, which came out when I was fourteen), but also part of why I don't own a copy. And then Steve Smith's dry, echoey drums start, and I remember the rest. Journey, REO Speedwagon and Asia all aspired to fill arenas (and did, to be literal), but not with the music the arenas I imagined demanded. At the time, I wanted faster, darker and heavier, arenas shaking like retributive deities had conjured storms inside the walls to remind us of the folly of architecture that presumes to titanic scale. I support some other approaches, now that I'm older, and in particular I have a much higher tolerance for sentimentality, but "Don't Stop Believin'" still sounds to me like a faded pencil sketch for something to be executed later in airbrush and steel. I've never managed to forgive Journey for all the missing "g"s in their song titles (most egregiously the bathetic "Lovin', Touchin', Squeezin'"), nor Perry for insisting that every single song he ever performed feature that same trademark semi-falsetto trill. And yet clearly there is the soul of something, straining to claw its way out of "Don't Stop Believin'", to which I respond instinctively and intensely. The chorus affirmation is banal, but so was "Don't Tread on Me", and although admittedly the song came on at a moment when I was particularly in need of uncritical encouragement, the effect has lingered for weeks, and I can still recall it tonight, just by humming a few notes. The song is, to me, at least melodically and timbrally, the aural equivalent of an extremely beautiful woman with long hair standing in front of a wind machine, or a sports car in full slow-motion sideways hydroplane, things I experience as viscerally cool even though I realize, consciously, that they're idiotic and/or irrelevant ("What primary quality are you looking for in a woman?" "Well, mainly that when she faces into a strong wind, I feel an urge to have sex with her." "And a car?" "Poor traction.").

I'm only thirty-three, which I ardently hope constitutes well less than half of my useful music-listening life, so I'm a bit concerned to notice my musical tastes undergoing a partial bifurcation into one creature that wants everything to sound like whatever I only just discovered last week, and one that wants everything to sound, in some small but unmistakable way, like something I heard on the radio when I was a teenager. It's not, I keep reminding myself, that I think music was better back then, otherwise I'd be buying Journey albums instead of falling for new bands that sort of remind me of them, but clearly I filter my experience of music that is new to me through my experience of (or my memory of my experience of) music that is old to me. At some point, especially in an art form dominated, at least commercially, by young artists, this starts to introduce a disconnect, as I get old enough that I'm associating new bands with old bands that the new bands never actually knew. If I hear things you don't, though, that's hardly my problem. "You are as young as you feel", we are admonished, as if age is a single point on a downhill time-line, and the goal of life is to stay as far uphill from death as possible. But the real trick isn't being fourteen at thirty-three, or even thirty-three at thirty-three, it's being, at all times, all the ages you've been so far. A day, received properly, doesn't shift your world, it expands it. Keeping in touch with new music is fairly easy (by which I mean that it's incredibly time-consuming, but emotionally self-sustaining), and keeping in touch with the music I loved when I barely knew any music is virtually effortless (I suspect I'll know "More Than a Feeling" and "Red Barchetta" as well in fifty years as I know them right now, whether I listen to them each a thousand times more or none along the way). Harder is keeping in touch with all the unanchored music in between, with 1988, 1992 and 1995. How will I remember, when I'm sixty, what I loved when I was thirty? (I'll read my back-issues, of course. You didn't think I was writing this for you?)

And if I'm proud of Fates Warning for adhering to their aesthetic principles, I'm even more cheered (if you can be cheered by grim music) (and you can) to find some new company for them. It's taken two studio records and a live album to disabuse me of the notion that all Gathering albums should recapitulate Mandylion, but after Superheat I finally relinquished the idea, and I'm thus ready to recognize how similar if_then_else is, in spirit, to Disconnected. Anneke van Giersbergen's voice is more ethereal than Ray Alder's, fluttery and supple where his is linear and stern, but she holds onto the notes at the ends of phrases that in standard pop and rock deliveries would be truncated (thus Journey's missing "g"s), and so these songs press on past the points where they might otherwise have resolved, or dissolved. The band sounds more than ever like a Sisters of Mercy who traded Andrew Eldritch's goth decadence for military discipline and Jim Steinman's production histrionics for several extra years of music-school training. The stately instrumental "Beautiful War" is unexpectedly elegiac, like a national anthem for a country so small everybody forgot about it, but most of the rest of the album is unflappable and introverted, as if the band are accustomed to, and comfortable with, being the only people who really listen to them. "Rollercoaster" has all the dizzying ups and downs of a very large tank driving over a pile of very flat protesters. "Shot to Pieces" is rather fast, but for the choruses, instead of speeding up further or modulating or any of the usual chorus tricks, the song just slows down for a moment, and then resumes the original methodical grind. "Amity", with its clicky synth-mallet dyads and a relatively spare arrangement that leaves Anneke's sinuous delivery as the focal point, reminds me faintly of Happy Rhodes circa Many Worlds Are Born Tonight. "Bad Movie Scene" begins with just Anneke and a skeletal guitar line, but by the end the usual slab-like structure has reasserted itself. "The Colorado Incident" makes me think of half-speed Rose Chronicles, "Analog Park" of the music the reissue of Metropolis should have had. "Herbal Movement" is torn between becalmed and gentle. "Saturnine" sounds like "Hell Is for Children" stated as a matter of fact. "Morphia's Waltz" is in 3/4, but Anneke's singing is so legato and arrhythmic that I don't expect to hear this song put to much practical use. And "Pathfinder", the instrumental conclusion, could be the dolorous soliloquy of the town-square clock in a plague-emptied Bavarian village. Anneke's distended vocal style makes it easy to understand words and hard to follow sentences, most of the time, but the lyrics are printed in the booklet, and are, with the painful exceptions of "Herbal Movement" ("The fabric softener of the mind / Makes everything easy") and "The Colorado Incident" (which is a stilted road song, not a Columbine elegy), vague and fittingly evocative. "Why did I ever think / Life is about to go on / In a minute", she wonders in "Bad Movie Scene". "It is time to reach out / To find something that isn't there", suggests "Analog Park", an inversion of "Don't stop believin'" that implies we haven't started believing. And yet "Morphia's Waltz", by way of answer, is a lullaby. "Sleep, child sleep, / Rest your eyes / Until the sun comes up / And you'll awake / To light everyone's day / Up again". It takes Anneke half a minute to relay this brief benediction, and another minute of background rustle for the song to end. But if we can't spare thirty seconds to say goodnight properly to our children and our passions, then we hardly deserve to wake up to them tomorrow. And if we can't spare a couple hours for measured, systematic records about perseverance and proportion, then how will we know the difference between the things that have happened to us, and the small things we've accomplished ourselves, and the big ones?