{"id":43588,"date":"2014-03-17T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-03-17T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/kaleidoscope\/"},"modified":"2026-07-04T11:20:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-04T11:20:11","slug":"kaleidoscope","status":"publish","type":"review","link":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/kaleidoscope\/","title":{"rendered":"Kaleidoscope"},"content":{"rendered":"

As I\u2019ve mentioned before, it\u2019s a strange-but-true story: for an alleged prog aficionado who counts Yes<\/a> and Big Big Train<\/a> among two of my favorite groups ever, I don\u2019t really like very much progressive rock. After 18 years of reviewing music, I\u2019m still trying to pinpoint the reasons why. <\/p>\n

Let\u2019s see if the new album from progressive rock supergroup Transatlantic can\u2019t help us with our diagnosis, shall we?<\/p>\n

Transatlantic features stellar players from four different major league prog outfits: Neal Morse (keys\/vocals, ex-Spock\u2019s Beard), Roine Stolt (guitar\/vocals, Flower Kings), Pete Trewavas (bass, Marillion) and Mike Portnoy (drums, ex-Dream Theater). One thing is easily stipulated from the top: these guys are fantastic musicians. <\/p>\n

They are also faithful progressive rockers; each of their bands has been among the proudest flag-bearers of modern progressive rock. As Transatlantic, they have continued to perpetuate the form. Their first album SMPT:e<\/i> featured a 30-minute epic, two 17-minute pieces and a couple of shorter tracks. Their second album The Whirlwind<\/i> consisted of a single 77-minute long piece of music (which was, frankly, a bit much for this listener). The new album Kaleidoscope<\/i> consists of two 20-minute-plus epics, with three six- to eight-minute songs wedged in between like the fixings in a sandwich.<\/p>\n

At this point we\u2019ve covered all the reasons why I should really love this: great musicians playing traditional prog forms, with a variety of song lengths. Now for the hard part: I don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Why is that? \u201cInto The Blue\u201d opens the album with a long instrumental jam that moves through several moods and stages, and it\u2019s pleasantly proggy in its way, but somehow\u2014and I may be projecting in part due to my strong aversion to Dream Theater\u2014they feel too heavy and show-offy to really appeal. Then when the music falls back to just Morse on organ and lead voice, I can\u2019t help hearing echoes of Styx circa 1978, by which I mean overcooked vocals carrying a significant cheese factor.<\/p>\n

Moments like the sunny guitar solo over warm synth and organ tones between 9:00 and 10:00 do sound a bit like Yes, but much of the time, I don\u2019t hear it. One of the distinctive features of Yes music is carefully arranged multi-part harmonies, and while Transatlantic has two principal vocalists in Morse and Stolt, they don\u2019t do much harmonizing or counterpointing. For the most part, this 23-minute epic feels like it\u2019s oriented to the darker, heavier, more bombastic side of the band.<\/p>\n

\u201cShine\u201d follows, a modest, pretty ballad that finds Morse and Stolt trading lead vocals over acoustic backing. It\u2019s a pleasant change-of-pace that fades quickly from memory. Next, Stolt takes the mike for the immediately contrasting \u201cBlack As The Sky,\u201d whose rather Deep Purple-ish vibe features Trewavas\u2019 pulsing, intense bassline and Morse\u2019s rippling Hammond organ runs fueling a sense of headlong momentum. \u201cBeyond The Sun\u201d strips things back down to piano and soaring slide as Morse resumes the lead vocal slot and reinforces my sense of the issue here; his vocal approach feels perfect for a Broadway show, big and melodramatic, but also somewhat affected and generic. \u00a0<\/p>\n

The 32-minute closing title track is epic in both structure and tone, and it certainly has its moments\u2014specifically, the opening, extended instrumental sequence; Portnoy\u2019s stellar under-jam drumming between 13:40 and 14:00; and the huge, rather elegiac closing sequence\u2014but in the end it comes off as more clever and impressive than emotionally engaging, somehow less rather than more than the sum of its many parts. <\/p>\n

Here\u2019s one key point of diagnosis on the whole why-doesn\u2019t-Jason-like-most-prog question: it\u2019s all about the vocals. The quality of the vocals (and to a lesser degree the lyrics) is absolutely critical for me, and they\u2019re the biggest weak spot on this album. Morse\u2019s are showy and overly melodramatic, Stolt\u2019s are agreeably lived-in if a bit strained at times, but the real issue is that the two don\u2019t support one another effectively; their voices don\u2019t seem to mesh well, and the vocal arrangements rarely rise to match the complexity of the instrumental work supporting them. <\/p>\n

Compounding the issue, the lyrics fail to engage, coming off somewhat bland and nondescript. I grant you that most of Jon Anderson\u2019s lyrics don\u2019t make literal sense, but their poetry is undeniable, and that lyrical quality and reach-into-your-subconscious resonance is absent here. (It seems doubly ironic, then, that Transatlantic recently backed Jon Anderson<\/a> for a mini-set of Yes songs on the Progressive Nation at Sea cruise hosted by Portnoy. They obviously love and admire the Yes sound\u2014it\u2019s just a more vocally complex and emotionally engaging sound than they seem capable of generating.)<\/p>\n

Transatlantic has won a passionate fan base, and this very talented quartet clearly enjoys working together. Their fans\u2014and many other prog fans\u2014will likely enjoy this album a lot. I can only report, with regret, that I am not among them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":31866,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[8599],"rating":[5614],"class_list":["post-43588","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-transatlantic","rating-rating-c-plus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/43588","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=43588"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/43588\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31866"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=43588"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=43588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}