THE NEAL MORSE BAND: THE SIMILITUDE OF A DREAM

The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan, an allegorical tale of a man who flees a doomed city to journey towards a better place, meeting various characters and situations along the way. Surely an obvious choice for a prog rock concept album. The British band After The Fire, before they changed into a New Wave band, recorded a song called Pilgrim in which they covered the whole book in less than eleven minutes. That effort was reasonable for its time, but if you need the proper prog treatment then who better than Neal Morse? Morse's album in fact takes 106 minutes to cover just the first part of Bunyan's story, so he 's certainly expanded on After The Fire's effort.

Musically The Similitude Of A Dream is closer to the sound of Spock's Beard than anything Neal Morse has put out as a solo artist. So if you like Morse-era Beard (and in particular Snow) then you should love this. There are also similarities in style to Sola Scriptura and Question Mark, which happen to be my two favourite Morse albums. I would go so far as to say this is the first time Neal has matched the quality of those two albums since then. Some parts of Similitude verge on heavy metal, which isn't really my cup of tea, but because of the quality and the mixture of other styles, I really like even the heavier parts. In fact, The Man In The Iron Cage, which pays an obvious homage to Led Zeppelin, is one of my favourite tracks. The only song I really can't stand is Slave To Your Mind, which opens the second CD. It's what my parents (bless them) would have described as "a racket." I wish it had been left off the album, or written as a more melodic piece.

As mentioned before, there is a lot of variety of styles here, from acoustic pieces right through to heavy metal, and the whole album flows nicely. It really should be listened to as a whole rather than individual songs, but having said that I have to pick out a few favourites - The Ways Of A Fool, Freedom Song, Shortcut To Salvation (nice sax solo here), The Man In The Iron Cage, and also the closing tracks on each CD which have the typical Morse emotional feel and grandiose endings. Neal Morse has put together an excellent band of musicians and produced one of his best albums. I will have to give it 5 stars as fractions of stars aren't allowed. In reality I would knock it down to 4.75 for Slave To Your Mind, but that's just me being picky.

As a final comment, only part of the book is covered on this album. I would love them to go on and do Vanity Fair, Doubting Castle, the Celestial City etc. But if not, Broken Sky does give the story a satisfactory ending.