WAITING...

When you think of progressive rock in the 80s you would probably immediately think of the British neo-prog scene blossoming with bands like Marillion, Pallas, IQ and Twelfth Night or you may even think of some of the RIO bands that emerged in the late 70s and carried on to the 80s like Univers Zero, Present, Art Zoyd and a few zeuhl bands from France and Belgium however there was a few artists that sprang up in the US as well. While the main contenders fall into the avant-prog camp such as Thinking Plague, The Muffins and Birdsongs of the Mesozoic, there were also some early crossover acts that prognosticated some of the sounds that would emerge in the 90s and beyond.

This US band named MADRIGAL picked the wrong time to form in 1977 when two teenagers Keven Dobson aged 18 and Dave Cebert aged 15 began this band in the city of Spokane, Washington. MADRIGAL began and would remain the sole project of Dobson who was immensely inspired by Deep Purple's keyboard sound by the late great Jon Lord and other 70s progressive rock which was a rarity in the US outback during the day but nevertheless found a few nerdy customers seeking out all those crazy sounds from overseas. Initially MADRIGAL simply covered the big bands of prog such as Genesis, Gentle Giant, King Crimson, Jethro Tull, Yes and even pseudo-prog bands like Ambrosia.

Considering the band formed the very same year the punk rock scene completely changed the musical landscape, the MADRIGAL project was swimming upstream from the very beginning but nevertheless toured the Pacific Northwest in both the US and Canada in the late 70s but sadly despite writing a lot of material and recording a bunch of it never got a chance to release an album. It didn't help that the band name MADRIGAL was already taken by a UK folk band, a Canadian psychedelic pop band, another US experimental rock band and even in the prog world was taken by a French band. Facing a bleak future MADRIGAL ended in 1980 but changed its name to UVU and played period covers until 1986.

With only Kevin Dobson carrying the torch along with guitarist Steve Dornbier by his side, MADRIGAL reformed in the late 80s and finally released its first album WAITING in 1989 which took a lot of the influences of the aforementioned bands and crafted a rather interesting blend of prog that sounds like it was a few years ahead of similarly sounding band such as Spock's Beard, The Flower Kings and even Echolyn. WAITING is a very symphonic sort of prog album although its composiitons are catchy enough for crossover appeal but the complex melodies exhibit a quirky off-kilter procession with equally unorthodox counterpoints that include arpeggiated guitar runs evoking Gentle Giant and equally demanding vocal polyphony. The symphonic compositional style reminds a lot of bands like Kansas and even Yes with flute and pastoral segments reminding of Genesis but overall MADRIGAL sounds like the 90s bands before they existed.

Given that this album consists of eight tracks from over a decade's worth of material to work with, there are myriad musicians appearing on different tracks but amazingly the album sounds rather consistent due to Dodson's leadership role in the project. Perhaps the one weak spot on WAITING is the oft mopey vocal style Dodson displays but somehow despite sounding like a prototype of Neal Morse makes it all fit in fairly well. The highlights of this album are the longer tracks like "Best Laid Plans" and "Old Moon" which have the time to explore the world of symphonic prog in much greater depth. The album ends with the surprising track which features the classic 20s ragtime sounds of "Skinbo Hambone" which is a fun little track that despite sounding completely out of sync with the rest of the album is pretty freaking cool. This is an interesting obscurity from the 80s world of prog. WAITING appears with the second album "On My Hands" in its entirety on the MUSEA compilation that was released in 2012.