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The historical view is that punk rock was invented to save the spirit of rock & roll from the bloated excess of the mid-'70s, the worst of which was embodied in that symbol of the prog rock era, the concept album. The T4 Project debuted 30 years later with an album as outlandishly over the top as those cracked, star-studded mid-'70s rock operas about experimental flying aces and Viking explorers by Hawkwind's Robert Calvert. Descriptively titled Story-Based Concept Album, the record is an amalgam of those plot-driven oddities The Who Sell Out and Green Day's American Idiot. The mainspring of the T4 Project is guitarist and producer Shannon Saint Ryan, who had previously led the obscure hardcore act Meet the Virus under the name T4. (In virological terms, T4 is a bacteriophage: it infects and kills harmful bacteria, specifically E. coli. Embarrassingly, the liner notes of Story-Based Concept Album suggest that Saint Ryan doesn't understand that T4 attacks and destroys harmful cells, not...