II

The 2016 sophomore album by the eclectic Mother Turtle was a remarkable improvement over the band's insecure debut, recorded three years earlier. The difference can be heard in the newly expanded roster, with saxophones, flutes and violins adding vibrant instrumental color to what had previously been a strictly secondhand palette, borrowed from too many Anglo-Prog role models.

The new music was still mostly vocal but featured longer, less song-driven passages, all of it more deeply rooted in the soil of their native Greece and revealing an exotic Balkan flavor appropriate to a young group at the crossroads between Europe and the Near East. And it's a concept album, too: another healthy sign of renewed ambition.

The subtext is artfully oblique, and totally open to interpretation. But it can be discerned in the many recurring musical and lyrical motifs, beginning with the a capella "Overture": a looping multi-tracked mantra recalling Gentle Giant at their knotty mid-'70s best. "People tend to forget / People tend to forgive", chant the overlapping singers, the implication being that we shouldn't do either.

That lilting refrain is repeated elsewhere, emerging again in the album's epic centerpiece "Walpurgi Flame", one of the more convincing long-form Prog fantasias in recent years. The ominous introduction recalls (without imitation) classic Van Der Graaf Generator, to a degree where I almost expected to hear Peter Hammill begin screeching about Scorched Earth, instead of the soulful female guest singers, together adding another oblique stylistic layer to the revitalized Mother Turtle sound.

The song eventually rises to a thrilling crescendo of Mellotrons, real strings, and aggressive guitar work: old school Progressive Rock, but framed in a more contemporary setting. A chilling epilogue follows, built around eyewitness documentary sound samples from the 2001 World Trade Center terrorist attacks: uncomfortable to hear, even after nearly two decades, but investing the album with deeper thematic meanings.

The same can be said about the album's video 'trailer' of song samples, edited to images of Jeanne d'Arc's martyrdom by fire...are you seeing a connection yet? And finally there's "The Art of Ending a Revolution", closing the album on an extended medley of dramatic instrumental jamming, and strong enough to elevate my conservative rating another full star. The slow fade-out suggests unfinished business, musically and (perhaps) thematically: an obvious signpost to the near-masterpiece of "Zea Mice", released two years later.

In the span of a single album Mother Turtle jumped from being a band worth watching to a band worth following. Not bad for a group named after a plodding amphibian synonymous with inertia.