For someone who\u2019s occasionally mistaken for an aficionado of progressive rock, I don\u2019t actually like very much of it.<\/p>\n
No, really.\u00a0 I may be a devoted-beyond-all-reason fan of Yes<\/a>, but beyond the ever-shifting confines of that single outfit, the trail goes cold pretty quickly.\u00a0 I\u2019ve heard and enjoyed the same seven songs by Emerson Lake & Palmer and Jethro Tull as every other FM radio listener of a certain age, but the rest of their catalogs?\u00a0 Meh.\u00a0 Early Genesis leaves me cold; I can only really get into a few patches of the middle, post-Gabriel and pre-stadium-tour albums. \u00a0Sure, I like Dark Side Of The Moon <\/i>and Wish You Were Here<\/i> a lot, but who doesn\u2019t?\u00a0 (Pink Floyd: the pop fan\u2019s prog band.)\u00a0 Rush, you say?\u00a0 Fair enough, I do like Rush quite a bit, but how proggy are they really, at least since 1981?\u00a0 <\/p>\n Moving into the modern era, Big Big Train<\/a> is the rarest of rare, really the only modern prog band of which I would call myself a fan (except for maybe Circa<\/a>, which is so Yes-like that I’m not sure it counts).\u00a0 I\u2019m just not that impressed with the big names on the modern scene.\u00a0 Spock\u2019s Beard<\/a> can have a strong feel for melody and structure at times, but doesn\u2019t typically grab me.\u00a0 Ditto the Flower Kings<\/a>.\u00a0 Marillion<\/a> I\u2019m indifferent to, and Dream Theater<\/a> I actively dislike<\/a>.\u00a0 <\/p>\n With that preface, imagine my stunted expectations for Transatlantic, a supergroup made up of members of the latter quartet of bands: Dream Theater\u2019s Mike Portnoy (drums), Marillion\u2019s Pete Trewavas (bass), Flower Kings\u2019 Roine Stolt (guitar and vocals) and Spock\u2019s Beard\u2019s Neal Morse (vocals and keys).\u00a0 In sum: \u201cYeah, okay, whatever.\u201d<\/p>\n Ah, but what ended up fascinating me while listening to this album is the way the four players’ styles meshed.\u00a0 I\u2019ve always found Spock\u2019s Beard and especially the Flower Kings a bit too bright and shiny, and not as heavy as I\u2019d like.\u00a0 With Dream Theater, the opposite is true; they\u2019re the veritable Jerry Bruckheimers of prog-metal, with everything overblown, bigger and heavier than it needs to be.\u00a0 (Marillion?\u00a0 Somewhere in between, I guess.)\u00a0 What I felt listening to SMPTe<\/i> is that the four players\u2019 musical personalities had balanced one another out in a genuinely appealing way.\u00a0 <\/p>\n That\u2019s as apparent on the truly epic opener \u201cAll Of The Above\u201d as anywhere on this album.\u00a0 Granted, when I saw that this first track actually outstripped the infamous Topographic Oceans<\/i> suites by a good seven or eight minutes, coming in at 30:59, I strapped myself in for something akin to a dentist appointment.\u00a0 Fortunately, while it does feel overlong, this particular epic hangs together reasonably well, with a mostly heavy rhythm section balanced by brighter, shinier guitars and keys.\u00a0 More importantly, there are some definite musical motifs that are repeated to provide structure and coherence, especially in the opening and closing sections, and some wonderful little jams.\u00a0 For example, around 4:00 in, Stolt starts doing this cascading riff that\u2019s so good you immediately worry that they\u2019ll flog it to death, but they don\u2019t; they quickly move on to another section, and another, but unlike with the Topographic<\/i> suites, these snippets hang together and flow organically.<\/p>\n When the Morse\u2019s lead vocals come in at 4:55, you\u2019re more or less immediately in Spock\u2019s Beard territory, of course, though Stolt\u2019s harmonies are frequently in evidence, and provide a nice fullness to their sound that\u2019s characteristic of Yes\u2019 multi-part vocal approach, but absent from the repertoire of too many modern prog outfits.\u00a0 There\u2019s another dynamic instrumental transition between 8:00 and 9:15, and if you were wondering how the keyboards hold up with a guitar player playing them, there\u2019s a nice back-and-forth between Morse and Stolt between 10:00 and 11:00 where Morse shows he can definitely handle the job.\u00a0 Et cetera, et cetera\u2026 yes, this is an epic that lives up to the label.<\/p>\n \u201cWe All Need Some Light\u201d is the one solo composition here, a rather inconsequential mid-tempo Morse piece that clocks in at a relatively concise 5:45.\u00a0 Similarly-sized \u201cMystery Train\u201d starts out with a complex, angular bit of guitar-organ interplay over a staccato rhythm that reminds me of some of Dream Theater\u2019s material and leads me to check the credits.\u00a0 Ah, yes.\u00a0 The way three of these five tracks are credited, the main writer, Morse or Stolt, gets the lead, and the other three get a \u201cwith\u201d notation.\u00a0 \u201cMystery Train\u201d feature Portnoy\u2019s name first in the \u201cwith\u201d column, and it shows.\u00a0 \u201cMystery\u201d might be the most commercially inclined of the tracks here, but still ventures off in proggy directions and has a very spacey outro jam and denouement into Floyd-style found sound and studio noise.<\/p>\n The 16-minute \u201cMy New World\u201d is currently my favorite track here, not so much on account of the vocals \u2013 Stolt takes them for the one track where he\u2019s the lead composer, and I tend to prefer Morse — but for the excellent balance and flow between the softer and harder sections, and very strong instrumental passages featuring all four players.\u00a0 Stolt in particular does a wonderful job of alternating between hard, hammering riffs and nimble, elegant jazz licks.<\/p>\n For a closer, the boys reach back into the early prog songbook for Procol Harum\u2019s \u201cIn Held (\u2018Twas) In I,\u201d a genuinely quirky choice of a genuinely quirky song, demonstrating once and for all that prog rockers are not humorless; they can even mock their own pretentions.\u00a0 Here Morse and Stolt trade off lead vocals to positive effect, and toward the end, Stolt takes another interesting solo where he adopts a bit of a Brian May approach, a rather regal tone… at least until he hits a pedal and begins channeling David Gilmour.<\/p>\n And in some ways that really says it all.\u00a0 These guys are students of progressive rock history, with the chops to make the music their own.\u00a0 In joining forces in Transatlantic, they\u2019ve managed to find common ground that\u2019s both familiar and unique, distinctly progressive and frequently appealing.\u00a0 Supergroup side project though this might be, I hope this quartet \u2013 who continue to collaborate between albums and tours with their \u201cmain\u201d groups \u2013 will continue to give Transatlantic the level of care and energy that went into this very enjoyable outing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":30374,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[8599],"rating":[5617],"class_list":["post-42034","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-transatlantic","rating-rating-b-plus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/42034","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42034"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/42034\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=42034"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=42034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}