SKY

What if prog rock simply wasn't very rock? The answer is that it would end up something like the debut album from Sky - a supergroup of musicians from a variety of backgrounds (John Williams from the world of jazz and classical, Francis Monkman from Curved Air, Herbie Flowers from numerous glam albums of yesteryear). On the one hand, if the basis of prog is to take a rock band lineup and let them perform virtuosic music informed by a broad range of musical genres, then this is undeniably prog - but it's prog as you'd implement it in 1979 by middle-aged musicians who seem to have decided to leave the harder-rocking stuff to the punk kids, set aside the psychedelic weirdness of prog's earlier days, and opted to turn out something reminiscent of the sort of fare Mike Oldfield, Camel, or the Alan Parsons Project were putting out at the time.

For some, this will no doubt seem unacceptably saccharine - but the power of music in part resides in its ability to touch a broad range of emotions and moods, and if you're in the mood for music which is often gentle, never aggressive, always thougthful, and generally quite light in approach, Sky aren't half bad. And it would be a flat-out mistake to regard this as some sort of commercial sell-out affair - unlike, say, Asia, it would be wrong to accuse this of being pop-prog, not least because if you were going to go pop in 1979 you'd never put out an all-instrumental album to begin with. Where Opposites Meet, the side-long epic that rounds it off, likewise demonstrates that these chaps can take a more overtly proggy approach when they decide it's merited - the trick is that these are all knowledgeable musicians who make excellent calls as to when it's good to go textured and complex, and where a touch of simplicity is needed. Hardly a world-changingly innovative work, but a slickly executed and seriously enjoyable one for that.

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