RED JASPER

What can be said about 777 that can't also be said for The Great and Secret Show? The second album of the Red Jasper reunion - and, so far, the final one - is thematically and musically so in line with its predecessor that it could have been dubbed "The Great and Secret Show 2: Now Greater and More Secretive". Florian Werner takes up the drum post here, but otherwise the lineup remains the same - which may be a problem if the main thing you liked about Red Jasper's original run were the boisterous and characterful vocals of Davey Dodds, because whilst Dave Clifford does a reasonable job as the vocalist, he's not Dodds (and is too sensible to pretend to be).

For me, the Achilles Heel of the album is the same as that for The Great and Secret Show, and to a lesser extent Anagramary - the band have almost entirely dialled back the folk elements of their music, swapping out the folk/neo-prog blend of their finest moments for a more purist neo-prog approach. Very occasionally there's a flash of the band's folk past - the bonus track is an acoustic number which may be intended as a nod to that former aspect of their approach - but compared to past works the difference is stark, and the lack of any folk instrumentation as a prominent feature of the sound is a dead giveaway.

What results is perfectly serviceable neo-prog stuff, but I've heard a lot of that and there's a lot of groups doing that sort of stuff. The distinctive personality of Dodds-era Red Jasper appears to have left with Dodds, and what's left behind doesn't quite stir me up the same way.

After SI Music/Cymbeline collapsed, a swathe of bands ended up somewhat in limbo, with significant chunks of their discographies left stranded without a publisher or distributor. For Red Jasper, the disintegration of their record company may have merely helped to confirm what they already knew in their heart of hearts was the case. Their final album for the label, Anagramary, had been finished, but they dissolved the band shortly after, with outside interests taking precedent.

It had been evident on Anagramary that something was awry, with Davey Dodds - formerly the life and soul of the band - no longer contributing as fully as previously, with drummer Dave Clifford pulling a Phil Collins to perform vocals on some of the tracks instead and with the mandolin which Dodds had made a trademark part of his contributions nowhere to be heard.

Indeed, on this reunion album, Davey is absent. The rest of the line-up who'd performed on the run of albums from Action Replay to Anagramary are present and correct, however, and Dave Clifford has completed his Collins Manoeuvre by taking on lead vocals full-time. Replacing Clifford on drums is Nick Harredance, who had previously been in Shadowland - the Clive Nolan-led neo-prog group that had been labelmates of Red Jasper back in the SI Music days.

This may have been an apt choice, since Red Jasper come back from hiatus to find that their sound has once again become narrower. When they started out on releases from their early EPs to Action Replay, you could hear a sort of mash-up of punk, folk, and neo-prog, all competing for time. Their peak came with A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Winter's Tale, which dialled back the punk side of things whilst keeping the folk and prog elements present and in balance - but on Anagramary it was evident that the folk was being drained off. The perhaps inevitable result of this was that their sound started to become a little more generic than it had been.

The Great and Secret Show reveals the completion of this process; folk instrumentation is basically absent, and bar for the odd acoustic moment this is very much along the lines of straight-ahead neo-prog groups. Losing Davey Dodds and his big personality behind the microphone was unfortunate, but to lose an entire dimension of the band's music is a crying shame.

The album - inspired by the Clive Barker novel of the same name - isn't terrible, but I found it largely forgettable as a result. Clifford as a vocalist isn't meritless by any means, but nor do I find myself particularly enthralled with his work. That would not be a problem had the folk dimension of the band's sound have been present as vividly as it was on Midsummer Night's Dream or Winter's Tale, but as it stands it is a further sign that Red Jasper's musical direction and my own tastes diverge from here on out.

Just as SI Music briefly transformed into Cymbeline before collapsing entirely - leaving various albums, such as this one, adrift on the market without any record company publicity behind it - so too were Red Jasper in the process of transformation as they unleashed Anagramary on the world.

What was going on behind the scenes to prompt this? According to the liner notes to the 2012 Angel Air edition, Davey Dodds - the characterful frontman of the group whose big personality and mandolin had been such a cornerstone of their sound - was less engaged with the album sessions than he had been previously, with the result that his contributions were dialled back. Whether Dodds would agree with that picture or have a significant new perspective to offer is unclear - to my knowledge, he's been happy to stay on the sidelines rather than getting involved in Red Jasper business, and he wasn't involved in their reunion in the 2010s, so I don't think we've had his side of the story.

Nonetheless, the idea that Dodds was on the way out - whether that be down to him deciding he'd done enough with the group, or his artistic goals and theirs diverging, or some other reason - seems plausible when listening to this. It's on the vocal front that it becomes obvious he's scaled back his involvement - Dave Clifford emerges from behind the drums to sing on a couple of songs, which is jarring given how distinctive Dodds' vocals are, and on the songs Dodds does sing his performance doesn't quite seem to have the fire behind it. He can still belt the songs out just fine - but it doesn't quite feel like he believes it this time around.

On top of that, his mandolin, which had previously been such a key element of the Red Jasper sound, is simply gone, and the folk influences on their sound are scaled back. Arguably, the history of Red Jasper has been one of gradually stripping away aspects of their sound; they began playing a punk/folk/neoprog mashup which was alright, but they gained focus once they set the punk part of that equation side and dialled up the folk a tad, resulting in a folk/neoprog blend which was truly unique. Here, they start to dial back the folk - the problem being that this steers them into a generic neoprog direction which is much less distinctive and interesting than what came before.

Anagramary is competent enough, but to me the magic is already drifting away from Red Jasper at this point. Their hiatus was a shame, but perhaps necessary to recharge their creative batteries; even when Anagramary catches fire, it's not doing an awful lot that preceding albums didn't do better and with more originality.

The biggest flaw with these two albums from Red Jasper wasn't anything to do with the content - it's that they came out through SI Music, which meant that distribution to the band's UK homeland was patchy and when that label collapsed entirely the albums were left in limbo for a bit.

In the early 2010s, Angel Air swooped in to the rescue, putting out a clutch of Red Jasper reissues which put the bulk of their material back into circulation, heralding their 2015 reunion. This release combines their first two SI Music studio albums, which found them abandoning the more punkish influences shown on debut album Sting In the Tale and the live release Action Replay in favour of a folk/neo-prog blend which was distinct to them.

They're an apt pair to bring together, because they both take a certain amount of thematic inspiration from Shakespeare (though both albums riff on the sort of ideas and concerns Shakespeare dealt with in his plays rather than adapting their plots in a narrative fashion), and because they're a seasonal pair, with Midsummer Night's Dream bringing the warmth whilst Winter's Tale offers colder, spookier material. Between that and the way the two albums are intertwined - The Night Visitor is Part 3 of Dreamscape, the first two parts of which are on Midsummer Night's Dream, and the Sonnet trilogy winds between the two as well, there's these nods to a mysterious "Jean" in some song titles - it makes absolute sense to reissue these as a package.

I could wish that the presentation were a bit less cheap and cheerful and that the original album art were given a bit more prominence, but this is a quibble when you're getting material this good in a bargain release. It's a crying shame that these albums were somewhat overlooked on their original release; Red Jasper had the misfortune of rising a bit too late to catch the original neo-prog wave, a bit too soon to get enthusiastically embraced by the Internet prog fandom. Angel Air deserve our gratitude for making their work available again.

The Winter's Tale finds Red Jasper further refining the approach of A Midsummer's Night's Dream - providing a chilly, spooky counterpoint to the sunnier (but still at points eldritch) style of the previous album, As previously, the band are now deep into the folk/neo-prog blend that made them such an original voice at this point in time - later groups like White Willow or Mostly Autumn would later walk the trail that the band had previously blazed - and if anything the punkish influences of their earliest work, already pushed way into the margin on the previous album, are now pretty much done.

There's a run-through of The Shamen's Song here which is very different to the rough early run-through that song received on 1992's Action Replay live album, and there's still plenty of nods to Marillion and Twelfth Night running through their music - in particular, The Night Visitor or Bread and Circuses are highly reminiscent of something that Geoff Mann-era Twelfth Night might have put out. The folk side of things is still represented, though, with Davey Dodds once again providing the bulk of the folk instrumentation as well as his distinctive vocals, which feel like they exist right in the sweet spot between Fish, David Bowie, and Peter Gabriel.

Improving further over its predecessor, The Winter's Tale may well be the moment that Red Jasper's distinctive folk/neo- prog blend reaches its sweet spot. I could nitpick - The Scent of Something, in particular, seems to belabour its musical ideas a bit much (and the drum production on it seems just a little off), though the triumphant crescendo at the end somewhat justifies this.

It's kind of a shame that the album came out through SI Music - not only did this risk Red Jasper becoming lost in the shuffle among the range of significantly less original and fresh groups who made up the also-rans in the SI Music stable, but it also meant that their distribution in their home country was patchy, and once SI Music went bust the album became hard to find. Thankfully, it ended up released (in a two-for-one set with Midsummer Night's Dream) on the Angel Air label in 2012, and thank goodness it did - because it would be a shame for such a strong album of folk-tinged prog like this to fall out of availability.

Red Jasper's first studio album of their deal with SI Music saw them adopting a mature sound. Gone were the more energetic punkish elements that had featured in their sound up to Action Replay; from here on out they would focus much more emphatically on the folk and neo-prog side of their sound. The main neo-prog touchstone here is early Marillion (though Davey Dodds' vocal performance draws less on Fish's Market Square Heroes-era style than he did on previous releases, there's still a Fish influence detectable), whilst the folk influences draw on the gentler moments of Strawbs or Jethro Tull.

The combination, however, ends up somewhere distinctive to Red Jasper - the sort of thing which their prior albums hinted at, but which their broad and diverse range of influences tended to obscure. The band do a grand job here of narrowing down their sound just enough to attain a focus which eluded them on past release without limiting it so much to become samey, and without becoming overly reliant on any specific one of their inspirations.

The album opens with an exploration of the extreme ends of their sounds - Sonnet I is an acoustic folk number, whilst Virtual Reality is a straight-ahead neo-prog piece with a Twelfth Night edge to it and more or less no folk influence (in keeping with its futuristic subject matter). From there on out, the different strands of their sound intertwine - perhaps appropriate to the Midsummer Night's Dream inspiration and the theme of two very different worlds crossing over.

On that note, this is a concept album - as is The Winter's Tale - but rather than attempting to summarise the plot of Shakespeare's play, the lyrics instead use the idea of the world of reality and imagination touching as a jumping-off point to explore various ideas. The end result is a great start for a new phase of the group, one which would see them through to their hiatus in the wake of SI Music's collapse.

The sole live album from Red Jasper is a fascinating document, since it doesn't quite reflect any particular phase of their studio work. Recorded in early 1992, after an attempt to record a late 1991 gig was foiled by technical difficulties. Given that we're dealing with a lean, hungry group here who hadn't achieved much in the way of commercial success, working with temperamental equipment, a caveat has to be added here: the sound quality of this isn't amazing. It's good enough that you can tell what they are playing and certainly better than bootleg quality, but you'd never mistake this for anything particularly pristine. Fortunately, the band at this stage were playing in a somewhat rough and ready style which can arguably be enhanced by slightly fuzzy recording quality, but at the same time it's a shame that the best live document we have of them pre-hiatus is a little murky in places.

Notably, Action Replay has only a light smattering of songs from the band's studio efforts. Specifically, Go For It and Come and By are from the England's Green and Pleasant Land demo album, England's Green and Pleasant Land is from the Pull That Thumb EP, and Old Jack, Second Coming, and The Magpie all come from the Sting In the Tale album. Add to that an early version of The Shamen's Song - eventually released on the Winter's Tale album - and you've only accounted for seven of the fifteen tracks here; the remaining eight are exclusive to this release.

Perhaps this reflects the way the band's evolution was continuing rapidly at this point in time - the product in part of significant line-up changes, with only frontman, whistle-blower, and mandolin wrangler Davey Dodds, lead guitarist Robin Harrison, and drummer Dave Clifford remaining from the Sting In the Tale lineup. Jonathan Thornton joined on bass and Lloyd George joined on keyboards, and the band simply did without a dedicated fiddle-player or saxophonist.

The early Red Jasper sound found the group bouncing between punk, folk rock, and neo-prog - imagine Jethro Tull infused with the more politically angry moments of early Marillion or Twelfth Night, then have a punk group play what you just imagined, and you might end up somewhere in the right ballpark. The harder edges of the group would fade away around this point in time, yielding a neoprog-folk mixture which would be showcased on their next studio albums, but the old style is still evident here and there on Action Replay.

It's notable, in fact, that the punkier songs - Hostage To Fortune, Go For It, and Come and Buy - are clustered towards the start (and two of those three are from their demo album), the band perhaps deciding to put their simpler material earlier in the setlist to prompt the audience to sit up and take notice. The progressive quotient starts gently increasing with World Turned Upside Down, a song named for an old-style broadside ballad from Civil War days (though lyrically it is original to Red Jasper), whilst by the end of the running order they are covering the odd folk standard like The King of the Fairies.

Listening, it's evident that there's been edits here and there to the album - some of Davey Dodds' between-song banter has been faded out here and there. This was presumably necessary to cram down the material to a CD running length, but it does mean that it's hard to assess whether this reflects the full setlist, either in terms of the balance of the material or the running order. The running order we get does capture the band in the process of saying farewell to their perhaps slightly unfocused past and pointing the way towards their future direction.

At the same time, it is a bit of a shame we don't get the full, uncut concert here, complete with between-songs patter, because it's evident from the snippets we get here that Davey Dodds was a fine frontman with a good rapport with his audience - comparable in that respect to Fish, to take an example from the same general scene that Dodds seems to have been at least somewhat influenced by in terms of his delivery. Indeed, shortly after this release Red Jasper would end up playing support to Fish himself - a good pairing, considering how the big man was working elements of Celtic folk into his own music at the time, whilst Red Jasper's approach to doing so had just the right mixture of similarities and differences to complement what he was doing without being overly derivative.

It was on the strength of this release that Red Jasper ended up signing with SI Music - first to distribute Action Replay, then to record some studio albums. Red Jasper were one of a clutch of UK groups of the era who'd release material through that Dutch label only for their hard work to become outright hard to track down in their home country in the wake of the label's collapse. Fortunately, the Angel Air label has rereleased the backbone of the Red Jasper discography, including this release, and listening to it in the present it's evident why SI chose to take on the group off the back of this one.

Whilst much of the SI stable ended up playing very straight-down-the-line neo-prog, Red Jasper were serving up something much more original here, and it's a shame that they've ended up one of the more overlooked groups of the UK prog scene - having the bad luck to rise too late to ride the original neo-prog wave and too early to get much of a boost from the coalescing online prog fanbase. The addition of traditional folk to a neo-prog ethos was as fresh in the early 1990s as the addition of folk ideas to a classic prog style was when Jethro Tull did it back in the 1970s, after all. A tip of the hat to Angel Air, for rescuing this gem and others from the vaults!

Red Jasper's debut album further develops their incorporation of folk instrumentation into a neo-prog-influenced musical foundation. Marillion is a common point of comparison, and certainly the political anger that underpinned songs like Market Square Heroes or Forgotten Sons finds its echoes here, but I'd also draw comparisons to Twelfth Night on that side of the balance sheet.

Album opener Faceless People, for instance, sounds like Fact and Fiction-era Twelfth Night discovered the sort of production aesthetic that goth groups like Fields of the Nephilim or the Sisters of Mercy pioneered in the mid-to-late 1980s - but then Davey Dodds drops this tin whistle solo in at the end which takes it out of the territory of anything Twelfth Night did.

A certain punk/new wave influence can also be detected, particularly whenever Pat D'Arcy's sax comes to the fore. Guy Fawkes feels like the product of band members listening to a lot of The Jam, for instance. D'Arcy would leave after this, and the band never really brought brass back into their sound, which perhaps explains why they focused their sound away from such material as their career progressed. It's only when Second Coming rolls around that we get much from Davey Dodds' trusty mandolin or a significant keyboard element, and that's when the album gets really interesting - with gothic touches on the vocals, pagan themes in the lyrics, and a folk-neoprog musical backing with just a touch of metallic bite on the guitars, it's a genre mashup which feels unique and distinctive to Red Jasper and which is only equalled on this release by the haunting Magpie or the stirring album closer I Can Hew.

Company Director is an update of a song from the England's Green and Pleasant Land EP/demo album - which is the only significant bit of the Red Jasper discography not to get a rerelease in some form on the Angel Air label, though to be honest, if this song represents the bit they decided was worth revisiting, I kind of understand that, since it's a bit muddled and meandering. A couple of other songs from that EP emerged on the Action Replay live album, but otherwise its material has fallow, and it seems likely that the band simply grew out of their early songs very quickly.

The most recent reissue of this album is the CD release on Angel Air, which tacks on the Pull That Thumb (Off the Top of Your Head) EP onto the end as bonus tracks. This is an apt choice, since that EP's mixture of punkier tracks and more progressive experiments is in keeping with the similarly divided nature of the group's sound on this album. With line-up changes incoming, they'd eventually refocus their sound around their folk-prog blend, making Sting In the Tale perhaps the last studio outing for their original approach (though a good chunk of their early material had an outing on the Action Replay live album which followed this).

Though Red Jasper did put out a long EP (or short demo album) before this, the Pull That Thumb EP is the earliest material of theirs that is easily available, offered as bonus tracks on the reissue of their debut album (Sting In the Tale) on Angel Air. The title track comes across as a punkish affair, with Pat D'Arcy's saxophone providing an interesting twist and Davey Dodds' vocals showing a certain influence from Fish. Given the strident political subject matter of the lyrics and the prog sensibilities of the band, it's highly tempting to see this as a sort of faster, punkier take on Marillion's Market Square Heroes. A similar approach is taken on Flagpole, which if anything is even punkier with only a tin whistle solo from Dodds showing their folkier side.

The B-side, though, is the 9 and a half minute England's Green and Pleasant Land? - that having been the title of the EP/demo album which preceded this, but this track didn't appear on there. As you might expect from the running time, it's an opportunity for the band to let their progressive side out, with whistle and mandolin from Dodds dialling up the folk influences on a long intro, whilst the main body of the song has Tony Heath offering a spooky keyboard backing as the tone shifts to something reminiscent of Grendel or Script-era Marillion.

One of the more common ways I've seen people describe Red Jasper's sound is "Jethro Tull meet Marillion", and tracks like this really justify that, since it's pretty clear that the sound of early Marillion was a big influence on Red Jasper and, like Tull did with 1970s classic rock, they keep finding inventive ways of working folk influences and instrumentation into the mix. At the same time, there really aren't many neo-prog groups out there who were able to replicate the mixture of political outrage and melancholic eerieness which characterised Marillion in the Market Square Heroes/Script For A Jester's Tear period, but Red Jasper manage it adeptly with that closing track here, which suggests that what is going on here is not mere rote cloning but a homage which shows a deeper understanding of what made Marillion's music from that period tick.

Red Jasper would go on to put out a string of albums after this, but feel like they were overlooked both by the mainstream and by much of the prog scene, perhaps having the ill fortune to have thrived in that awkward window just after the neo-prog craze died down but before the internet prog scene became a juggernaut. Yet on the strength of this initial EP it's clear that there was something special here, and giving these tracks a try has certainly got me looking forward to exploring the rest of their discography.

The retooled RED JASPER really had its origins in "Anagramary", the last release before the long hiatus, as this marked the moment when they dispensed with the more overtly folk aspects of their character and plunged into the sea of samey neo prog. They handled it quite well, and even improved upon it when David Clifford stepped out from the shadows and replaced the inimitable Davey Dodds on "The Great and Secret Show" just a few years ago. Their penchant for melody with a dramatic flair was rekindled and they have now extended the sample size to 3 with "777".

This release is a logical extension but flawed in several key areas, chiefly in its garrulousness, a common neo prog ailment against which they seem to have forgotten to be vaccinated this time around. Moreover, many of the themes are overly repetitive, and, even where sudden shifts occur, the listener quickly learns to anticipate them which sabotages much of the enjoyment. Both "She Waits" and "The Gathering" are guilty of this laziness, while "Reaching Out", notwithstanding some enjoyable synth soloing, and "Nothing to Believe" are even more generic and predictable, with choruses that stumble out of and back into the recycle bin.

The album's best moments are at the very beginning and towards the end. "7" recaptures some of their folky past while being catchy and edgy. "Dragonfly" is more reflective and pastoral, contrasting with most of the directness of the remainder. "Paradise Folly" slyly re-purposes the balladry of the Sonnets from their long ago classics but only adds to the sense of meager inspiration elsewhere. A fine bonus track is added, the haunting "October and April" originally performed by THE RASMUS, handily adapted and made their own in a live setting.

I'm not suggesting that RED JASPER wait another 15 odd years for another offering, only that "777" may have been allowed to escape prematurely and breached the thin red line between British prog folk and generic neo prog. 2.5 stars rounded down.