LOVE OVER FEAR

Pendragon's latest album was very unfortunately disappointing for a band that is often touted as one of the best neo-prog bands (and for good reason - The Masquerade Overture IS a fantastic album); but it also frustrating because while the musicianship is very clearly present - the band performs excellently and there are some satisfying instrumental sections - the lyricism and the overall compositional approach simply causes the album to fall flat on its face.

The first song I heard off of this album was the last one, "Afraid of Everything", and out of context, it's a very pleasant atmospheric track. When I actually sat down to listen to the whole record, though, the beginning of "Everything" already had me a little apprehensive right off the bat. I'm not one to knock the value of simplicity in music; especially in such a complex genre, it's important to mix in a tasteful amount more straight-forward moments - otherwise your album turns into a mess of noodling and over-indulgence. But the snare-driven power pop drum beat that the album starts out with goes on for just over 50 seconds - I was already over it halfway through around the 25 second mark when, for reasons I can only imagine, Velazco chooses to perform a fill that I can only associate with a 16-year-old on the drum kit at Guitar Center who wants to be a metalcore drummer but still sucks at double bass techniques, so he slows it down just enough for the fill to lose its energy and become entirely boring.

This might seem like quite an unnecessary amount of complaining over just 50 seconds of a 64 minute album, but its the first of countless underwhelming compositional choices throughout the album that all add up to result in a general feeling of mediocrity. It feels like Pendragon felt the need to make their music "more accessible" to the Millennial population (or whatever) despite simultaneously being both: A. already a fairly melodic and "pop-oriented" (70s pop, not 00s pop) neo-prog band, and B. old enough that it's painfully obvious that they are out of touch enough with the world today that their attempts to be "relatable" (I think? It's honestly hard to tell) end up being more painful than if they had just stuck to their guns.

This is a bit of a harsh criticism when looking at the instrumental side of the music alone, but beyond the band's lackluster composition choices, the lyrics are the real thing that absolutely kill this album's chance of being worth listening to. Much like Orion 2.0 on 2019's "Virtual Human", Pendragon seems to have the impression that everyone below the age of 40 is a technology-obsessed idiot who knows quite literally nothing about anything that happened before the year 2000. Take the following set of lyrics from the opening track "Everything": "You're just a Mona Lisa staring at a screen / Knows nothing of the Nephilim and all that goes unseen / Another would be Socrates just melting in the crowd / Doesn't know who Lennon was, the legend of The Shroud". First of all, I had no idea that Nick Barrett was so devoutly Jewish that he thinks everyone needs to know about the Nephilim from the Hebrew Bible, although given that he also wants everyone to know about the legend of the Shroud, I have to pity the man for his obvious spiritual crisis between Judaism and Christianity. Secondly, just like Orion 2.0, Pendragon just kind of throws the line "staring at a screen" in there as if they don't have an official website, a Twitter account, an online store, a Bandcamp page, as well as Nick Barrett's own personal BLOG (which, admittedly, he only seems to update once every 3-5 years). They also sell their tour tickets online, which is pretty obvious given that that's the #1 way to promote yourself nowadays, but it still makes them sound like hypocritical idiots to pretty much anyone with a brain who thinks about it for more than five seconds. Also, how old and cynical do you have to be to think that people nowadays don't know who John Lennon is? It's like no one in the band has taken a step outside of their house in the past 20 years. Or, what is much more likely, the band couldn't be bothered to put a single shred of creativity into their lyrics, so they slapped a bunch of lousy, half-hearted, meaningless nonsense together and called it a song. This theory is further supported by the lyrics in the song "Water": "When the wolf is at my door / She wraps her waves around you / And makes you feel loved once more / 'Cause water is the truth // I can't turn my back on this / 'Cause back on dry land is where all the trouble is / Lost in stories by Hemingway / Feel the salty ocean spray". If you take out about half of these lines, you might be able to make some lick of sense out of what's left, but it's just so obviously gibberish soup that might sound deep on the most extremely superficial level possible, but in reality doesn't mean a goddamn thing. I would pay actual money to anyone who can look me in the eyes and tell me on a completely serious and genuine level what on earth those lyrics are supposed to mean.

I think above all else, the fact that I got genuinely more angry about this album throughout the hour that I spent writing this review solidifies my belief that this is a 2-star album that has decent musicianship, but beyond meeting that absolute bare minimum criterion, isn't worth anyone's time.