A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM

Red Jasper's first studio album of their deal with SI Music saw them adopting a mature sound. Gone were the more energetic punkish elements that had featured in their sound up to Action Replay; from here on out they would focus much more emphatically on the folk and neo-prog side of their sound. The main neo-prog touchstone here is early Marillion (though Davey Dodds' vocal performance draws less on Fish's Market Square Heroes-era style than he did on previous releases, there's still a Fish influence detectable), whilst the folk influences draw on the gentler moments of Strawbs or Jethro Tull.

The combination, however, ends up somewhere distinctive to Red Jasper - the sort of thing which their prior albums hinted at, but which their broad and diverse range of influences tended to obscure. The band do a grand job here of narrowing down their sound just enough to attain a focus which eluded them on past release without limiting it so much to become samey, and without becoming overly reliant on any specific one of their inspirations.

The album opens with an exploration of the extreme ends of their sounds - Sonnet I is an acoustic folk number, whilst Virtual Reality is a straight-ahead neo-prog piece with a Twelfth Night edge to it and more or less no folk influence (in keeping with its futuristic subject matter). From there on out, the different strands of their sound intertwine - perhaps appropriate to the Midsummer Night's Dream inspiration and the theme of two very different worlds crossing over.

On that note, this is a concept album - as is The Winter's Tale - but rather than attempting to summarise the plot of Shakespeare's play, the lyrics instead use the idea of the world of reality and imagination touching as a jumping-off point to explore various ideas. The end result is a great start for a new phase of the group, one which would see them through to their hiatus in the wake of SI Music's collapse.