I'm a little late with this one. Had it written (truth to tell, I have several written) but I completely forgot I hadn't uploaded it. So here it is, about fifteen minutes over my personal deadline.
From the days of Deucalion, Chapter 1 --- Leap Day
This album put me in two minds. On some levels it’s pretty damn great, on others it’s quite a disappointment. Sometimes I found myself excited and sometimes bored. Some tracks I wished were longer and then some of them I could not wait to see the back of. Such is the dichotomy presented by Dutch outfit Leap Day who, like many or indeed most of the bands here so far, I had never heard of prior to this. Indeed, I didn’t even know such a thing as Leap Day existed --- Leap Year, yes, but Leap Day? Well apparently it’s the name given to that very day which turns every fourth year into a Leap Year, February 29. Who knew?
This is the third album from the band, and once again, like the previous few album it’s a short one in terms of tracks, eight in total. None of them are epics --- the longest is twelve minutes, with the shortest, the opener, a mere two --- and they vary as I say between pretty good and pretty meh. There’s a nice acoustic opening and it’s slow and laidback for “Ancient times”, the guitar not anywhere near Hackett level, but not bad. It goes straight from that into one of the two longer tracks, “Signs on the 13th” which is just over nine minutes long and opens on droning, bassoon-like keys and a crash of drums building to a mini-fanfare, slow and graceful like the overture to a symphony or the opening to an opera. Things start to get a little harder dramatically, the keyboard sounding like violins in that urgent tone strings have a way of creating, and getting slowly (very slowly) louder with odd little sound effects flying around in the background. For the keyboard soundscapes we can look to both Gerrit van Engelenburg and Derk Evert Waalkens, the percussion mostly handled by Koen Roozen. It’s a good “overture”, but it goes on so long (four minutes) that you’re fooled into thinking this is another instrumental, before the vocal comes in on almost the fifth minute, low and soft and almost unmarked, as Jos Harteveld makes his entrance.
I must give him credit here, as he really does not try to take over the song as most singers do when they arrive but despite his intentions, if such they are, it’s his voice that you’re drawn to, not because it’s loud and brash but because it’s so much the opposite. Like they say, sometimes a whisper can be louder than a scream. Or something. This is one of the songs that impresses me, almost a theme for the album. which I think may be a concept but I can’t confirm. Similar topics seem to run through the songs though and it does seem like they’re telling some sort of story. A very nice Pendragon-style guitar solo from Eddie Mulder as the song moves towards its final minute, then we’re into “Changing directions”, something more of a rock song with a nice guitar intro then some sweet Hammond before it kicks up and bops along really well on the back of the two keysmen’s flying fingers.
If this wasn’t so long it would probably make a good single, as it has that commercial, radio-friendly appeal that much of Marillion’s material from about 1992 to about 2005 had, but the song runs for short of eight minutes so it’s not a candidate, if any of the tracks indeed are. Good vocal harmonies provided by both the keyboard players as well as Mulder. Definitely one of the heavier songs on the album, though in fairness that’s not saying that much. Very pleasant though. The longest track is up next, with “Insects” running for just over eleven minutes. Another nice acoustic guitar intro with the thunder that closed the previous track carrying through here. Jos has been compared (badly) to Gabriel, and I can sort of hear it here, but I think it’s an unfair accusation. He has his own voice and is probably just influenced, like many prog vocalists, by the master.
It’s a nice gentle opening to the song, with some soft piano and what sounds like violins but is I guess synthesiser, the melody almost reminiscent of something you might hear from the Carpenters or a group of that ilk. The slow guitar break in the fourth minute is this time very Hackett inspired, however the fifth minute gave me a real problem when I was listening to this on my MP3 player walking along, as it’s mostly the sound of insects flying and seemingly engaging in some sort of war, and I, unaware the sound was on the music, kept flinching and going to swat imaginary bugs that I believed were attacking me!
The music gets a little intense and mad here as I guess the war plays itself out, then in the eighth minute or so it calms back down on the back of whistly keys and upbeat guitar, dropping back to acoustic in the ninth before Jos comes back in with the vocal and taking the song to its conclusion. This could have something to do with the likes of a plague of locusts, like in the Bible, though I’m by no means sure, but the final line
”Was it a punishment or environmental?” would seem to indicate there may be some truth in that. “Hurricane” opens with an
acapella line from Jos then some powerful keys and a screeching guitar that reminds me of “Run to the hills” --- I’m not crazy about the vocal here and this is one of the weaker songs certainly: it’s just a little empty of ideas I feel. It is in fact one of a triumvirate of lower standard songs that follow each other. “Ambrosia” has the potential to be a really great track, but seems to lose its way fairly soon. A gentle acoustic guitar line and soft vocal quickly punches up through the registers and the song changes totally, becoming something of a mix of an Arena track and a refugee from an early Genesis album, while the less said about “Haemus” the better. I just find it totally standard, by-the-numbers rock, hardly even what I could comfortably call prog rock. Very generic.
Luckily though the album recovers at the end and finishes well with “Llits doots nus --- Sun stood still”, a seven-minute instrumental incorporating elements of the Alan Parsons Project with some nice guitar and bass work, this in fact being the only instrumental track on the album, and though it does little to wipe the memory of the previous three tracks from my mind, it does at least ensure that the album closes, if not quite on a high, then at least with grace and polish.
TRACKLISTING
1. Ancient times
2. Signs on the 13th
3. Changing directions
4. Insects
5. Hurricane
6. Ambrosia
7. Haemus
8. Llits doots nus --- Sun stood still
Yeah, again I can see why this album is so low down the list, though in fairness there are albums I have already reviewed that should be well above this. It’s a solid album but I would question its even being included on the list, when so many good progressive rock albums I heard last year were not. It’s one of those albums where the good tracks struggle to balance out the bad, but in the case of “From the days of Deucalion, Chapter 1” it’s an impossible task. If this was a debut album I might have been more forgiving, but these guys have had four years to perfect their formula, and to be honest they still seem unsure as to what direction they want to go in.
Would I listen to another album by Leap Day? Let me put it this way: while listening to six or seven of these albums on rotation on a playlist I began to learn to dread when their name came up. Put it another way: if Leap Day released only one album every leap year it would probably be one too many. Or a third view: if this is chapter one, I’m not in any hurry to hear chapter two!
I won’t trash the album, as there are good songs on it, but they can’t save what is basically a relatively substandard album that probably only made it onto the list by the expedient of sleeping with the listmaker, so guys you will have to be happy with my, I think more than generous,
5/10.