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Napier's Bones - Monuments CD (album) cover

MONUMENTS

Napier's Bones

 

Crossover Prog

4.16 | 13 ratings

From Progarchives.com, the ultimate progressive rock music website

flyingveepixie
4 stars Monuments is the fifth studio album from Napier's Bones who in their own words :

'take the Classic Prog-Rock sound as a foundation and build upon it to create their own challenging and extended form of progressive rock music.

Their focus is firmly on dramatic storytelling with subject matter capable of resonating with the listener today. Music that references the past but is very much of the here and now.'

The band comprises only two members : Gordon Midgley who is responsible for the music, lyrics and backing vocals, and Nathan Jon Tillett who provides lead vocals and does all the bands artwork.

The album 'Monuments' consists of 5 tracks totalling 51 minutes with the longest track being the epic opener 'Standing Childe' at 23 minutes.

In keeping with all of their previous albums, Napier's Bones have maintained consistency in giving this album the classic vintage style production which hearkens back to the golden era of traditional prog, the influence of which is obvious not only in the song writing style, but also from the omnipresent mellotron, the delightfully vintage sounding lead guitar work, and the overall song arrangement and production.

Listening to this album is a little bit like stepping through a time portal to the early 1970s, and the listener could easily be forgiven for thinking that this was a heretofore undiscovered classic album from the likes of early Genesis or Barclay James Harvest. This is also one of those albums which has a multitude of little sonic secrets to discover with many hidden gems in the instrumentation which you seem to start noticing only after several listens. There is diversity in the music throughout with peaks where all the instruments are working flat out and more delicate troughs consisting only of acoustic guitar and vocals.

I'm currently working through the album on my third listen and find it to be one of those albums which grows on me with each listen. I recommend it for fans of the old style classic prog who might be looking out for some new music which holds to the old traditions.

flyingveepixie | 4/5 |

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