CAPTAIN BEYOND

Another nice surprise to me in 2007 was discovering Captain Beyond, together with the debut from Audience this has to be the best surprise. What power this band has! I´m totally in shock. This is progressive hard rock, but mostly it rocks like hell. It´s a bit more subtle than your average hard rock band though and that´s where the progressive part starts. They remind me of a band I have spend a lot of time listening to the last couple of years and that´s Orange Goblin ( a band I would like to have added to prog archives). Especially their new album Healing Through Fire is really much like Captain Beyond. Well you get the point. If you like Captain Beyond chances are you will like Orange Goblin too.

I didn´t know about Captain Beyond´s history and the rather prominant gentlemen that make up this band before I read the biography here on Prog Archieves, but I was never in doubt that these were outstanding musicians. I guess I´ll have to check out Iron Butterfly ( I only know you know what song). I have never really listened much to the first couple of albums from Deep Purple but maybe they are also worth purchasing. Evans is a great and pretty diverse singer, I´m pretty impressed with him.

The songs on the album are mostly hard rock with some of the meanest riffing I have ever heard, but there are progressive tendencies that keeps the album exciting throughout the whole playing time ( It´s only 35 minutes but every minute is exciting). The most progressive songs on the album are: Myopic void, Thousand days of yesterday and As the moon sparks, the rest of the songs are more or less hard rock even though there are twists. I have to note that all the songs seque into each other making the whole album a musical concept. The lyrics sound really tripped out and drug induced.

This is an excellent album and I can highly recommend it to anyone into hard rock, who like me finds the general structure in a hard rock song a little too predictable and who want´s something a little more challeging. The fortune here is that even though this is a little more prog than your average hard rock it still kicks ass bigtime.

I can´t praise this album enough but I think a 5 star rating is a little much though. 4 stars will do, but I´ll tell you I was really close to a 5.