NOISE FLOOR

Noise Floor is the 13th Spock's Beard album, and their third with Ted Leonard of Enchant serving as lead vocalist. I thought the previous two albums had been excellent; Brief Nocturnes and Dreamless Sleep had a very adventurous sound as the band threw a bit of everything at the wall (including some guest contributions by Neal Morse, paying a visit back to his old haunts to help the new frontman kick things off with a bang).

Conversely, The Oblivion Particle found them shifting their sound in a somewhat different direction from previously, perhaps in a conscious attempt to give the Ted Leonard era a distinctive sound of its own - something that felt like a fairly accessible mashup of Trick of the Tail-era Genesis and Kansas, along similar lines to Crucible and their overlooked 1990s prog classic Tall Tales, with perhaps a few more pinches of AORish-ness here and there.

Noise Floor is, in essence, The Oblivion Particle 2 in this respect, in that it largely finds the band following that same general course. How you feel about this will depend on how invested you are in prior sounds adopted by Spock's Beard. If you were very big on the epic-length compositions, Gentle Giant nods, and the occasional unexpected ingredients from genres not typically associated with prog of the Neal Morse era, or the somewhat recalibrated eclecticism of the Nick D'Virgilio era, then you may find this is a little straightforward for your case.

If, on the other hand, the idea of Spock's Beard turning their hands to fairly gentle neo-prog appeals, then you'll have fun with this one. It's interesting to see what happens when bands which could produce something much more technically complex (and the Beard have proved they have those chops several times over) instead turn their talents to something like this - working in a neo-prog/AOR format not because they have to, but because they have made a conscious decision to. In this case, I find it rather charming, and another grand success from the Ted Leonard-led incarnation of the band.

One point of interest here is that Jimmy Keegan is no longer on drums - he'd had to drop out due to other commitments prior to this. Nick D'Virgilio comes back to help, but as with Neal Morse on Brief Nocturnes and Dreamless Sleep this is strictly in a guest musician capacity, not as a full member of the band. In addition, as with The Oblivion Particle the band don't write as much of this material as you might expect - good chunks are written by Stan Ausmus and John Boegehold.

Stan and John have been assisting the band with songwriting ever since Feel Euphoria, but it feels like with The Oblivion Particle and this album the rest of the group have scaled back their songwriting contribution and let Stan, John, and Ted Leonard take the lead. It's notable that subsequent to this album, Dave Meros, Ted Leonard, and John Boegehold would reunite with Jimmy Keegan to form Pattern-Seeking Animals, a spin-off project who've been more active in terms of getting releases out than Spock's Beard.

With Pattern-Seeking Animals forming an outlet for the more melodic approach of Boegehold, will we see subsequent Spock's Beard albums shift away from this approach? Maybe, maybe not - but I for one am glad that the Beard have taken this journey into a more immediately accessible style, which they execute without embarrassing themselves or outright abandoning some of their more intricate roots - they're just a bit more artful about how they deploy those intricacies.