STING IN THE TALE

Red Jasper's debut album further develops their incorporation of folk instrumentation into a neo-prog-influenced musical foundation. Marillion is a common point of comparison, and certainly the political anger that underpinned songs like Market Square Heroes or Forgotten Sons finds its echoes here, but I'd also draw comparisons to Twelfth Night on that side of the balance sheet.

Album opener Faceless People, for instance, sounds like Fact and Fiction-era Twelfth Night discovered the sort of production aesthetic that goth groups like Fields of the Nephilim or the Sisters of Mercy pioneered in the mid-to-late 1980s - but then Davey Dodds drops this tin whistle solo in at the end which takes it out of the territory of anything Twelfth Night did.

A certain punk/new wave influence can also be detected, particularly whenever Pat D'Arcy's sax comes to the fore. Guy Fawkes feels like the product of band members listening to a lot of The Jam, for instance. D'Arcy would leave after this, and the band never really brought brass back into their sound, which perhaps explains why they focused their sound away from such material as their career progressed. It's only when Second Coming rolls around that we get much from Davey Dodds' trusty mandolin or a significant keyboard element, and that's when the album gets really interesting - with gothic touches on the vocals, pagan themes in the lyrics, and a folk-neoprog musical backing with just a touch of metallic bite on the guitars, it's a genre mashup which feels unique and distinctive to Red Jasper and which is only equalled on this release by the haunting Magpie or the stirring album closer I Can Hew.

Company Director is an update of a song from the England's Green and Pleasant Land EP/demo album - which is the only significant bit of the Red Jasper discography not to get a rerelease in some form on the Angel Air label, though to be honest, if this song represents the bit they decided was worth revisiting, I kind of understand that, since it's a bit muddled and meandering. A couple of other songs from that EP emerged on the Action Replay live album, but otherwise its material has fallow, and it seems likely that the band simply grew out of their early songs very quickly.

The most recent reissue of this album is the CD release on Angel Air, which tacks on the Pull That Thumb (Off the Top of Your Head) EP onto the end as bonus tracks. This is an apt choice, since that EP's mixture of punkier tracks and more progressive experiments is in keeping with the similarly divided nature of the group's sound on this album. With line-up changes incoming, they'd eventually refocus their sound around their folk-prog blend, making Sting In the Tale perhaps the last studio outing for their original approach (though a good chunk of their early material had an outing on the Action Replay live album which followed this).