Ladies And gentles, welcome to my last CD review (for a while at least). On the menu today we have a funktastic soufflé of jam-based rock and rollishness. The Incredible Heat Machine is bringing the heat in its newest album, “Stories the Birds Had Told.”

Featuring 11 songs, the album is a good example of a matured local band. The feel of the album is a cross between happy funk-jam rhythms and songwriting full of carefree positive vibes. From time to time there are elements of progressive rock, and some interesting social commentary, but mostly it’s just happy sounds.

Instrumentation is based primarily around electric guitars, electric bass, drum kit, male lead vocal and a variety of keyboard and synth sounds. There are also a good deal of percussion instruments throughout, and some acoustic guitars. The sound is well balanced and it is obvious that this band has many, many hours of playing behind them (thus the mature band comment).

For the most part, the production of the album feels like it was recorded live. The songs don’t seem overly polished or over mixed. If pocketing or auto-tuning were used in this album, I cannot tell. It sits well with other albums in my stereo though, so it was certainly recorded and mastered in a way that suits the style well and mechanically works.

Mixes are not perfect, but problems are probably not noticeable to the untrained ear. In some cases, songs could be polished much harder for the purpose of presenting a radio friendly single. However, anyone who really cares about music probably doesn’t listen to much FM radio anyway, so maybe that’s a null point.

So overall, I have to give this album a fairly high rating. I think this band has produced a listenable product from beginning to end. The entire CD flows and never really gives you a reason to turn it off (it makes good background tunes). The music makes you feel happy and there are even some extremely catchy melodies (try track 6, “Eden”) in sections. On the other hand, the style is not something extremely new and different, so some artistic types of people may be turned off. However, people who enjoy upbeat jam rock or a bit of non top-40 styled songwriting will probably enjoy this album a lot. I would encourage the group to avoid putting tracks that sound similar (like tracks 9 and 10) together in order on future albums. Also, I would encourage the group to continue playing together as much as possible. The sound has a cohesion that can only be found when musically like-minded people practice together frequently.