SPOCK'S BEARD

After dialling back on the classic prog side of their sound in favour of a more modern-rock-with-a-prog-twist approach on Octane, Spock's Beard seem to have flinched back from that direction. I happened to like it a lot, but I'm also aware that other prog listeners weren't so keen on it, and it's perhaps to win back those fans that Spock's Beard shifted back into a more traditional prog direction here, albeit still with sufficient modern updates that it still feels like the band are doing something new.

Indeed, they seem pretty confident this time around: it's a ballsy move to put out a self-titled album at this stage in your career. Making your first album self-titled is often a no-brainer - your debut is usually going to be the foundation of your sound, after all - but making a later album the self-titled one suggests that you believe that this time around, you have hit on a musical statement which really sums up who you are as a group, and all you've done so far at that.

Well, how do they do? I'd say pretty well! It feels like a significantly more confident take on some of the stuff they were doing on Feel Euphoria, in fact. (Just listen to some of those more modern electronic sounds and drums on With Your Kiss, for instance - those certainly put me in mind of some of the material on that album.) Once again, it feels like there's a significant Genesis component here - something the band had always dipped into a bit, and which they'd leaned on a little further after the departure of Neal Morse and the mild shift away from the Gentle Giant-influenced sound of their first six albums - and in particular, some almost pastoral moments here and there, which perhaps hint at the later compatibility Nick D'Virgilio would discover with the Big Big Train crew later on.

Not that this is Spock's Beard turned into a Genesis clone, mind - though since Nick actually did appear on a Genesis album he's sort of got standing to go there if he wants to, even if it was Calling All Stations. Skeletons At the Feast verges on prog metal in its dark, pulsating, kinetic ferocity, and there the Genesis influences might kick in towards the three minute mark but the journey up to that feels like something more akin to the darker moments of Dream Theater or latter-day IQ.

They're not just going for complexity for complexity's sake, though - Is This Love is a quick high-energy pop song which feels like a modernised Deep Purple number. Is it a little goofy? Yes, sure, but it doesn't outstay its welcome and it's a nice breather after the intense instrumental preceding it. And then take the Here's a Man section of the As Far As the Mind Can See, which offers up Weather Report-esque jazz fusion interspersed with more metal-esque choruses.

The end result is another solid album which, though different in approach from Octane, is to my ears just as strong - and will probably be more pleasing to a greater range of the band's listeners than that one was. If anyone still had any question about Spock's Beard post-Neal Morse, this album should have put paid to those doubts.