313

Phideaux has produced 6 albums within four years, all with different characteristics. This one is mainly Prog Folk and Rock/Pop influenced. Therefore '313' is not consisting of typical Prog Rock material. It rather sounds just like a singer/songwriter album. Some songs remember me at Matt Johnson (THE THE) very much. Retro back into the 60s/70s - no track is longer than six minutes. Very melancholic in some cases as one can expect. Some sources say the album is titled in this way because the recordings of this project initially begun on 3/13/04.

The best songs are at the beginning and the production gets weaker in the second half. I don't want to describe every piece of music but to emphasize some more important songs. Have You Hugged Your Robot? is a retro pop song with more tempo and some vocoder modified vocals. A Storm Of Cats - very sensitive with a nice melody and excellent piano playing. And Never Gonna Go is another ballad and the most proggish song IMO because of a heavy mellotron use.

This album is a matter of taste of course. So I'm not really excited but I have to confess it's a good effort with some careful detail work.

For this occasion, Phideaux decided to put an album together in ONE single day (on March 13. 2004, hence the title). Did he want to appear in the Guinness book of records? I have to say that this approach doesn't really reach the level of its glorious predecessors.

After some sort of a Hammill opening song, the mood is getting heavier and more "robotic". "Have You Hugged Your Robot" starts with the riff of "In the Hall Of The Mountain King" from ELO and features distorted and electronic vocals to meet the robot's standards. Press next.

Most songs are on the short edge and don't provide lots of emotion. It is just a collection of average numbers which are flowing nicely into one another as if this was a concept album, but that's it. Here and there, some better songs do appear ("Never Gonna Be") but the global folkish feeling combined with electroinc ones are not the ones I was expecting from a Phideaux album at this time of his career.

This album is a major disappointment as far as I'm concerned. These "computerized" vocals sound pretty bad and the music is not much better I'm afraid ("Pyramid"). A boring feeling emanates from this work.

My favourite song is by far the upbeat and catchy "Sick Of Me". Some light in this ocean of darkness. But the experimental "Cats 2 Space" brings us back into the most miserable mood.

It is strange how Phideaux constructed some of his albums. Starting the composition of songs and then leave them unfinished, then coming back to them a year or two later to finally release an album. The same technique was used for the excellent "Chupacabras". But this "313" is dramatically lacking the grandeur and beauty of this beautiful album.

I guess that you can tell about the content just watching at the cover. My advice is just to avoid this album and concentrate on his two prior albums ("Ghost Story" and "Chupacabras").

Two stars.

I am enthousiast about this album, really. 313 is at first a blend of this and that; mainly tiny songs that have no connections between them. But disliiking the album because of it's lack of 'progressive concept' is not listening with your ears correctly.

313 has the most potential in melodies of all Phideaux' albums. Why? Every song is so c-a-r-e-f-u-l-l-y crafted, they're just not stretched into an epic. Most of the songs have this Doomsday Afternoon quality and if you exploit them a bit, they would become epics easily.

I'd say 90% of this album is delightful, especially the robot song, the one about cats, Sick of Me and the track Never Gonna Go. The latter is extremely impressive, having such strengh and grandeur in only 3 minutes, it's majestic!

313 smashes into smithereens albums build on the same patron (later Pink Floyd for instance).

I discovered something great, and spread the word in all the land.