A Pleasant Shade of Gray A Pleasant Shade of Gray A Pleasant Shade of Gray is a concept album by the progressive metal group Fates Warning, released in 1997. It contains one song divided into twelve parts and is noted for its darker mood and more progressive style. "A Pleasant Shade Of Gray" is a single song that is divided into twelve tracks. The album is notable for its darker mood and mixture of progressive rock and metal with hints of industrial, classical, and psychedelia. Jim Matheos wrote the album following Fates Warning's 1994 tour in support of "Inside Out", with Matheos mailing tapes to
A Whiter Shade of Pale keyboard. The final instrumental fades out to silence – a common device in pop music of the time. A BBC Radio 4 programme in the 2018 series “Soul Music” pointed out the resemblance between the Hammond Organ line of “A Whiter Shade of Pale” and J.S.Bach’s Air from his Orchestral Suite No. 3 BWV1068, (the “Air on the G string”) where the sustained opening note of the main melodic line flowers into a free-flowing melody against a descending bass line: Allan Moore notes “a certain family resemblance” that “creates the sense of [Bach’s] music without actually quoting it.” The similarity