THE BLACK PILGRIM

Jump have been knocking about in the melodic rock arena for a good long time now, and it's evident from The Black Pilgrim that they have been evolving their sound considerably over the years. The last Jump album I heard was All the King's Men, which struck me as being a fairly flavourless melodic rock album with the occasional neo-prog flourish here and there.

Subsequent to this, they seem to have taken on a folk element to their sound, leading to a mashup of neo-prog and folk on The Black Pilgrim which is novel and competent but ultimately leaves me just as cold as their early work did. At points the songs seem to be fairly formulaic soapboxes for lyrics like those to The Eagle Has Landed, which seems to straight-facedly embraced Moon landing conspiracy theories in a way I find entirely risible. (It may be satirising them, though if it is I'm not seeing where that happens).

In a more musically intricate and nuanced release I'd be occasionally willing to overlook dubious lyrical subject matter, but when what you have here is a setup where the lyrics are that front-and-centre it's harder to get past this. What's worse, though, is that if I set that song aside I find that the rest of the album passes by perfectly pleasantly but nothing really stands out to me - and when the only bit of an album which makes you stand up and pay attention is its embrace of utter rumour-mongering nonsense, that's kind of a bad sign.