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Diagonal - The Second Mechanism CD (album) cover

THE SECOND MECHANISM

Diagonal

 

Eclectic Prog

3.80 | 160 ratings

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Neu!mann
Prog Reviewer
3 stars 2012 saw the belated release of the sophomore effort by a young British group who made a splash with their debut album four years earlier, and after this one vanished with barely a ripple.

The new music was the same throwback Heavy Prog as before: a convincing facsimile of the early 1970s, nimbly tracing the analog footprints of the band's musical forefathers. But several shifts in personnel over the preceding four years (losing two key players; consolidating the remaining quintet) left its mark on their sound, which by necessity had to be kept on a tighter leash this time.

Make no mistake: there's no shortage of excellent music here, played with admirable skill and dedication. The aggressive yet measured "Voyage/Paralysis" opens the album on a Crimson-influenced rabbit punch, and the repetitive drive of "These Yellow Sands" builds to an undeniably thrilling, breakneck climax, setting up the ominous "Mitochondria", with its distant echoes of classic Van Der Graaf Generator.

But a degree of momentum was obviously lost in the long wait between albums. And the exertion needed to rebuild it from scratch can perhaps be heard in the more deliberate compositional focus within each track, most of them instrumental (the unfortunate vocals in the song "Hulks" were thankfully kept to a minimum).

In my review of the band's self-titled debut I applauded the way they managed to avoid the copycat habits of other retro-proggers, by not trying to mimic Yes, Genesis et al. Instead, the album (and this one also, to a lesser extent) sounded not unlike a 1971 cult act, newly rediscovered. It's an approach that made their old-school aesthetic fresh again, but at the same time posed a unique problem.

The music of those second-tier Progressive rockers from the 1970s is enhanced today by distance and nostalgia, as reminders of a lost Golden Age when true musical creativity hadn't yet been marginalized by the demands of commerce. But Diagonal doesn't enjoy that same advantage: the band is too new and working in a different zeitgeist, which might explain why the experiment folded after only a couple of albums, both of them quite strong. This second and possibly last recorded effort is a notch below their first, but it improves when heard in sequence. Spin the '08 debut, and then play this one to better appreciate the refinement of purpose.

Hopefully the group is only dormant, not completely dead. Of course, the same wish could easily apply to the style of music itself, but in the immortal words of Clarence Darrow (a true progressive, but not a rocker): "Lost causes are the only ones worth fighting for."

Neu!mann | 3/5 |

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