PROVIDENCE

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.