CAPTAIN BEYOND

Without a doubt in my mind, this is a superb hard rock band producing a superb hard rock album. However, when looking through a prog scope, there seems to be a slight issue here. Is this prog? How could it NOT be prog? My answer; I don't know, I don't care. Unfortunately, the iffiness factor might be the reason I strike this album from masterpiece status.

The band can play, the execution is spot on, the transitions are perfect, the music has depth and the riffs just strike your inner rock-n-roll nerve that makes you want to fist pump to ad infinitum. You'll have to do it in some tricky metre as it seems like every other time signature the band plays in is some odd number for most people. This is all under Rod Evans's smooth vocal execution which augments the band quite nicely, even if I'm not currently familiar with his tenure in Deep Purple.

Long songs and virtuoso passages aren't here, so don't expect too much pompousness. Also, keyboards are rare to nonexistant, so it's more of a hard rock album than a prog rock album in those respects. I like these types of prog albums as proggers aren't sure whether to accept CAPTAIN BEYOND for it's depth or ignore it because it's too much of a rocker than a progger, and my curiosity feeds off the endless debating.

Songs like ''Dancing Madly Backwards'', ''Mesmerization Eclipse'', ''Raging River of Fear'', ''Frozen Over'' and the ''I Can't Feel Nothin'' parts are perfect outputs of what Captain Beyond are all about, at least on this album. Who says a little rock is bad for your prog health?