SNOW LIVE

Spock's Beard double concept album Snow was released in 2002 and Neal Morse left the band right away, without ever doing a tour for the album. This caused many to consider Snow 'the Beard's Lamb Lies Down on Broadway', but at least Genesis did tour the album before Peter Gabriel left. So in a sense, dreaming of a Spock's reunion to play Snow in its entirety felt to many like many of us dreamed of a Genesis reunion to play again the whole The Lamb in the 1980's or 90's. Nope, it never happened'

But this time the dream came true. With occasion of MorseFest 2016 and for a one-off concert, Neal rejoined the new complete Spock's lineup together with Nick D'Virgilio to perform Snow from top to bottom. So we get a 7 members band plus a trumpet and a sax for some songs. The 2 drummers Nick and Jimmy Keegan, 2 keyboardists Neal and Ryo (with Neal of course also playing guitars), Alan Morse, Dave Meros and Ted Leonard who sings and plays guitars, and all of them doing some vocals. The venue was Neil's local church so the audience is rather limited, and I envy them.

The performance is top notch and the sound and video quality are very good as you can expect from a 2017 release. You can see that the guys really enjoyed themselves in this gig. Having Keegan as double drummer allowed Nick D'Virgilio to take more center stage and sing lead vocals on some songs, something he clearly enjoys. Alan also visibly had a great time. The only one looking a bit more contrived is Ted Leonard, which is rather understandable being relegated to a small podium behind Alan and with Neal Morse clearly stealing the show with his endless energy. Even though Ted gets to sing lead on both runs of 'The Devil's Got My Throat' and does a lot of backing vocals and accompanying guitars.

As said the performance of Snow is flawless, and as encores we have (yeah you guessed it?) 'June', and the 27 minute suite 'Falling for Forever' including a very nice drums duet between Nick and Jimmy. And as bonus we have about 1 hour of Q&A with the band members, including producer Rich Mouser, and about half an hour interview with Neal about the writing of Snow and the idea of rejoining the Spock's for this gig. Plenty of stuff to enjoy.

So for all fans of The Beard this is a dream come true.