Album Title: X
Artist: Spock's Beard
Nationality: American
Year: 2010
Subgenre: Neo-Prog
Player(s): Nick D'Virgilio (Drums & Lead Vocals), Alan Morse (Guitars, Backing Vocals), Ryo Okumoto (Keyboards), Dave Meros (Bass, Additional Backing Instrumentation)
Familiarity: Pretty familiar with the Neal Morse era.
Favourite track(s): “The Edge of the In-Between”
Why? A strong 10 minute opener, which I thought was going to set the tone for the rest of the album, sadly it didn't.
Least favourite track(s): Nothing was really bad enough to single out here, it just all happened to be mediocre instead of bad.
Why? The problem is that a large number of the tracks were very average.
Any preconceptions prior to listening, whether good or bad? Well I always enjoyed the Neal Morse era, so I was expecting at least something to that quality.
Factoids you'd like to share? I guess they're Star Trek fans and there was a real concern that the band would be leaderless after the departure of Neal Morse. General consensus is that they weren't but I think they were.
End impression: Decent playing and good musically but I was too uninterested to pick up on any individual musician here, but anyway does being good musically really make a good album these days? Well not really imo.
Comments: I really struggle with this kind of modern day prog that incorporates too much in the way of pop sensibilities and this is one such album. It's glossy and really lacks substance underneath the gloss and the band are really riding the production train here. Tracks like "Kamikaze" come across as a homage to classic era Yes, but do they really need to do this considering that the rest of the album is aimed at being a viable commercial release? Overall the album comes across as prog by numbers and I suggest that if anybody wants to hear what this band is capable of, then they're best off checking their early output and starting with albums like The Light.
Rating: 3.0 quite simply means average, decent and nothing special and that is exactly what this album is.