THE WHIRLWIND

The return of Transatlantic in 2009 with The Whirlwind, an album-long prog symphony in some twelve parts or so, was perhaps just as surprising as their original hiatus. The project had gone into hibernation back in 2002, when Neal Morse quit it (and Spock's Beard), declaring that he felt a calling to make more explicitly religious-themed work and he didn't think it would be right to drag those band projects down that same rabbithole. Whilst Spock's Beard was able to solider on with a reconfigured lineup, Transatlantic was explicitly constructed as a supergroup of four personalities, and so didn't feel they could keep going without Neal onboard.

However, Neal's departure was not as final as it might have first appeared. For one thing, there was an extra dimension to Neal's decision which hadn't been widely aired at the time, though it would eventually become more generally known: his young daughter had been diagnosed with a life-threatening heart condition, which had apparently corrected itself. Such an incident not only explains why Neal felt an intensifying of his religious feelings (because he attributed this recovery in part to prayer), but clearly would have given him ample reason to dial back on band projects with significant touring requirements associated for the sake of spending more tame with the family.

The passage of time would eventually cure Neal's need to distance himself from band projects; in his solo career he would not only put out a range of prog albums which combined his distinctive musical approach with various Christian themes, but also had a little cottage industry going when it came to putting out more straight-ahead worship music. Furthermore, as the years passed and his daughter's health troubles were more firmly in the past, perhaps it became easier to contemplate doing the odd Transatlantic project and tour, with the immediate need to spend as much time as possible together as a family being alleviated.

In retrospect, there were clues all along that Neal wasn't 100% done with Transatlantic. For one thing, Mike Portnoy of the band had also performed drums on all of Neal's solo prog albums, so it's not like he was out of contact with the rest of the group; for another, during his solo career he had been producing a steady trickle of cover versions of mostly secular songs (compiled on the Cover 2 Cover series), so it's not like he felt every single musical endeavour he turned his had to had to be 100% exclusively Christian-themed. Moreover, Roine Stolt of Transatlantic has worked in some Christian themes into his music here and there - such as on The Flower King solo album which provided the seeds of the Flower Kings project to begin with. Transatlantic might not have been the right project to do entire concept albums explicitly based on Biblical stories or Church history, but the other musicians are hardly the sort you'd expect to toss their instruments down and leave the studio in a huff if there turned out to be a religious theme here and there in the music.

As it stands, 2009 feels like it was the perfect time for a Transatlantic reunion to come together. Neal's prog solo albums were for the most part pretty solid, but listening to Lifeline - his last prog solo album before this reunion occurred - I can't help but think he might have been running a bit short of ideas, and so pivoting to a band-based project might have been the perfect opportunity for Neal to recharge his prog batteries, with collaborators to both propose their own ideas and to help refine his own.

Roine Stolt, meanwhile, had just put the Flower Kings on hiatus after wrapping up their 2008 tour commitments, and wouldn't come back to that project until 2011. Marillion had put out Happiness Is the Road in the previous year and were finding their creative reserves a little tapped - they'd do the Less Is More album of acoustic rearrangements of existing material in 2009, and then take some three years to bring Sounds That Can't Be Made to fruition - so Pete Trewavas wasn't so busy with the day job that he couldn't come around for bass. As for Mike Portnoy, he hadn't officially left Dream Theater yet, but they had completed what would turn out to be their last studio album with him, and when he did leave in the following year he cited enjoying other projects more than he was enjoying Dream Theater himself.

Clearly, then, the weather was blowing in the right direction for the good ship Transatlantic to set sail again, and this return voyage turns out to be a real treat. On Bridge Across Forever the band had found a sound in which their different musical personalities were all finding expression and which by and large sounded like its own entity, rather than "Spock's Beard By Other Means" as their debut album, SMPTe, sometimes came across. Neal Morse takes the bulk of the lead vocals, but hasn't pushed Roine Stolt out entirely here - rather, Roine is given those sections which his voice better does justice to, so both of them are playing to their strengths in that respect. In return, there's a better demarcation of duties when it comes to guitar: Neal is handling acoustic, Roine is on electric, which means that Roine's presence is better expressed (because any time you hear electric guitar - and there's some great solos there - it's Roine). Meanwhile in the rhythm section, Portnoy and Trewavas let rip with their particular skills, providing the engine which really gives the album a sense of forward motion.

As far as the overall composition goes, it sounds like another Neal Morse long piece in structural terms, but that's fine - Neal's always been a dab hand at structuring these things, and whilst there's moments here and there which sound a little bit like a Neal-ism, there's just as many which sound like a slice of the Flower Kings. More to the point, whilst parts sound like something you could imagine Neal contributing to the stew, none of it entirely sounds like his solo career, despite half the band being key musicians on those solo albums. If Neal was being the "big picture" guy here, taking everyone's contributions and fitting them into a framework, it's worked out just fine, because the mosaic that results sounds distinctly different from the sort of thing he'd cook up by himself whilst still having his fingerprints on it.

Thematically, you can certainly still pick up some of Neal's religious convictions if you've a mind to, but it's not as front and centre as in his solo work. Sure, his solo work is often very unsubtle on this point - but here he's not giving any explicit thoughts on church doctrine or delving into particular incidents from the Old or New Testaments, it's more the sort of material you might hear any cosmically-inclined, slightly hippy-ish prog band wheeling out where you can probably track where the lyricist's head was at when they wrote the words, but they're more interested in expressing broad universal themes than getting into specifics.

I've spoken a lot about Morse in this review, but that's largely because his decision to first leave Transatlantic and then come back to the project hangs so heavy above the project. As it stands, The Whirlwind ends up being the best sort of supergroup project, in that it simultaneously clearly makes best use of the strengths of the various contributors and allows their different personalities to be felt within the music, but at the same time it becomes a whole greater than the sum of its parts, producing music which shows the trademarks of all the contributors but at the same time doesn't quite sound like the sort of thing any one of them would produce on their own.

Of all the members of the group, Morse is the one who had been most immersed in producing stuff on his own rather than in band projects in the time since Bridge Across Forever, so it's gratifying to see him moving smoothly back into a band project and finding new ways to express his particular compositional style whilst at the same time embracing the opportunity to work with collaborators as equals. As far as the band as a whole goes, this really sounds like they haven't missed a beat; had Transatlantic stuck together after 2002 and produced a new album instead of Neal going off on his solo career, I can't imagine them producing something much better than this.