THE WINTER'S TALE

The Winter's Tale finds Red Jasper further refining the approach of A Midsummer's Night's Dream - providing a chilly, spooky counterpoint to the sunnier (but still at points eldritch) style of the previous album, As previously, the band are now deep into the folk/neo-prog blend that made them such an original voice at this point in time - later groups like White Willow or Mostly Autumn would later walk the trail that the band had previously blazed - and if anything the punkish influences of their earliest work, already pushed way into the margin on the previous album, are now pretty much done.

There's a run-through of The Shamen's Song here which is very different to the rough early run-through that song received on 1992's Action Replay live album, and there's still plenty of nods to Marillion and Twelfth Night running through their music - in particular, The Night Visitor or Bread and Circuses are highly reminiscent of something that Geoff Mann-era Twelfth Night might have put out. The folk side of things is still represented, though, with Davey Dodds once again providing the bulk of the folk instrumentation as well as his distinctive vocals, which feel like they exist right in the sweet spot between Fish, David Bowie, and Peter Gabriel.

Improving further over its predecessor, The Winter's Tale may well be the moment that Red Jasper's distinctive folk/neo- prog blend reaches its sweet spot. I could nitpick - The Scent of Something, in particular, seems to belabour its musical ideas a bit much (and the drum production on it seems just a little off), though the triumphant crescendo at the end somewhat justifies this.

It's kind of a shame that the album came out through SI Music - not only did this risk Red Jasper becoming lost in the shuffle among the range of significantly less original and fresh groups who made up the also-rans in the SI Music stable, but it also meant that their distribution in their home country was patchy, and once SI Music went bust the album became hard to find. Thankfully, it ended up released (in a two-for-one set with Midsummer Night's Dream) on the Angel Air label in 2012, and thank goodness it did - because it would be a shame for such a strong album of folk-tinged prog like this to fall out of availability.