PROVIDENCE

This 18th Mutiny in Jonestown studio album takes us back to the world of HP Lovecraft. First up though, is the nearly 8 minute song, "Brumeaux Mon Couer". The only French lyric song the band ever recorded. What is it about? Good question! Fact is, I didn't write down the lyrics and my French comprehension is so poor I can't figure out what I'm singing. I guess it will remain a mystery, but I definitely like it especially the lead guitar parts.

Next up is the showcase piece of the album, if not Mutiny in Jonestown's best extended piece, one of Lovecraft's most well known short stories, "The Shadow Over Innsmouth". On the CD release, it's a single 34:59 minute song, but BandCamp isn't able to handle songs of that length (talk about being not prog friendly!) so it was broken up into 2 halves. The lyrics follow the original story closely and the musical accompaniment is varied, at times guitar driven heavy prog and others mellotron drenched?but make no mistake, telling the story is the highest priority of the piece. As the main character visits Innsmouth on a sight-seeing and architectural vacation, he discovers something very wrong. The streets are mostly deserted and the people he does see appear less than human. An interesting musical break at around the 10 minute mark of part 1 always reminds me of "It" from "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway". It wasn't written that way, it just sort of happened.

Part 2 continues to tell the story as the main character meets an old man who's seen the history of the city and it's descent into decadence. He (Zadok) tells his story and the main character realizes Innsmouth is not a place to be after dark. Events finally lead to the realization that the man must flee the city before the creatures destroy him. The final lyrical section where the main character flees only later to come to the realization that he is becoming one of the Innsmouth creatures himself is one of the best Mutiny in Jonestown musical sections. The final guitar solo is possible the best the band ever recorded.

Rating this album is very difficult as I'm stuck between a 4 or 5 star review...a 4 1/2 stars would get me out of my dilemma, but that's not an option. I think the album is great, but it does have a wart or two so it's not perfect. If you look at my previous reviews for this band you can see I have given the band 2 star reviews 12 out of their first 17 albums so I'm trying to be very objective and critical. After listening to the whole album and both Innsmouth parts 1 and 2 a couple of additional times, I concluded that while it's not absolutely perfect, this album has everything I look for in a masterpiece of prog which is the definition of a 5 star album, so I believe the correct rating is to give the band their first 5 star review.

I remember to have commented MUTINY IN JONESTOWN quite badly when it was suggested for addition some years ago. Luckiky I wasn't in the neo-prog team yet. The reason is that I thought that music inspired to the work of H.P. LOVECRAFT can't be so "happy" as the samples I listened to were.

I don't remember which albums these samples were from, but surely not this one.

Providence is the city where Lovecraft spent almost all his life except a couple of years in NY when he was married to Sonia, a woman he previously ghost-writed for. This album contains a short track which is not bad but seems to have been added to fill a LP length. The over 30 minutes epic, which is shipped in two separate parts from Bandcamp, is inspired to one of the most scary novels written by HPL, and one of his last.

The music this time has the dissonances needed to make it sound weird enough, even if pure neo-prog moments appear here and there. For me, concentrating on the music and its qualities without thinking to the sensations that the novel is able to give, is very hard. I'll do my best.

First of all, a multi-instrumentist usually has a weakness, at least with one instrument. Dennis MONTGOMERY, even if not a virtuoso (at least not in this album) is able to play all the instruments at the same good level. There are good ideas and the voice is not very powerful but especially in this epic he sounds like GENTLE GIANT. The darker moments are more in sintony with the story, especially the first minutes of the second part of the suite, when his rocker soul is temporarily offline. I's in those moments that I hear a connection with Gentle Giant.

When the rocker soul emerges...well, it's rock.

The second part of the epic, so the last 20 minutes are the best part of this album, at least for me, because in some moments it's able to partially recreate the atmosphere of the novel. If you don't know the novel, please believe me: being so weird is everything but easy.

So I'm happy to have actually had no voice in the evaluation of this project for addition. I was wrong and this album, currently the only one Mutiny in Jonestown's album that I've listened carefully enough for a review, deserves to be featured here. The vocals aren't the best skill of this artist, but fit perfectly with this music and this subject.

Never stop at the first impression.