Trollheart

99.

Album title: Clocks That Tick (But Never Talk)
Artist: Grand Tour
Nationality: British (Scottish)
Sub-genre: Neo-prog


Is it a coincidence that the first two albums on the list both have clocks in the title? I guess so. They're certainly two very different albums by two very different bands. I'm aware of the work of Comedy of Errors, though I have to be honest and say I have never listened to a full album, and Grand Tour appear to have grown up out of that band, not from the ashes, as Comedy of Errors are still around, but as a kind of perhaps not side project in the vein of Pete Trewavas's Edison's Children or John Mitchell's various alter-ego bands (Kino, Frost*, Lonely Robot etc) but I don't know, project in tandem? Maybe this is why, despite being together for fifteen years, Grand Tour have released precisely two albums. In fact, when Comedy of Errors reformed in 2011 after a hiatus of nearly twenty years, they released an album called Disobey, followed two years later by Fanfare and Fantasy. All well and good. But in the year Grand Tour released their first album, Comedy of Errors also released their third, Spirit, following this up with House of the Mind in 2017.

So how that worked I don't know. You seem to have Comedy of Errors releasing an album in 2015 at the same time, roughly, as Grand Tour debuted their Heavy on the Beach. Guess they worked pretty hard, so like I say we can forgive them for only churning out the two (Grand Tour) albums in fifteen years, with the first only coming across ten years after they, um, formed. Right.

So, was it worth the wait? Well...

One thing I will say upfront about this album is that I did not like the vocals. Not one bit. There's something really odd about the vocal stylings of Joe Cairney, and while I can give the guy props for having been the driving force behind Comedy of Errors and obviously lasting through the neo-prog revival of the eighties led by bands like Marillion, Pallas and IQ, I just don't get his voice. I don't get it so much that for a long while I wasn't going to bother giving this a second spin. But if there's one thing my adventures with Black Metal, Death Metal and Doom Metal has taught me it's that just because the vocals may not be your cup of tea doesn't mean you should give up on the band. I've learned to appreciate superb shredding while ignoring or even laughing at high-pitched shrieks from a BM vocalist, or the low, animalistic gruntings that sometimes characterise Funeral Doom Metal. So where say five years ago I would have said if I don't like the vocals it doesn't matter how good the music is, I won't listen to it, I don't feel like that any more. Much.

So I was prepared to give Grand Tour a chance. Not, I hasten to add, that Cairney's vocals come close to a Steve Tucker or a Chuck Schuldiner, or even a Quorthon; I can listen to them without my ears bleeding or feeling like I should maybe bring the cat in before the neighbour's dog is let out. I just don't particularly like them, and unfortunately, in progressive rock, a good, melodious, mellifluous voice is often a real prerequisite. Even prog metal fails to benefit from indecipherable or unlistenable vocals. Threshold have had some great and very powerful vocalists (Damien Wilson, Andrew “Mac” McDermott (RIP), Glynn Morgan) but power is one thing, violence another. I can listen to Black Metal vocals or the growls on Doom Metal because the music complements them, sometimes even demands them. When you're singing about Satan (what a cool name for a Black metal band, huh?) you really need someone who sounds like they're screeching in pain, and you don't want to hear a soft crooner when he's growling about the bleakness of life and the absurdity of existence, do you?

But while both those sub-genres tend to focus more on the music (like Janszoon once helpfully advised me, think of the rough vocals as just another instrument) with the vocals either secondary or often almost superfluous, prog rock is all about the lyrics, and no matter how nice the music is – unless the band is instrumental, as some are – you need and want to be able to hear and make out the vocals. This is not in any way an issue with Grand Tour, but the fact that you can't as it were ignore the vocals and concentrate on the music – if you do, you lose a lot of the meaning of the songs – makes it imperative really to be able to enjoy the vox, and while I slowly warmed to Cairney, he would never be my favourite singer, in fact I have a hard time thinking of anyone in prog who I dislike more, in terms of vocals.

Anyway, now I've got that off my chest, let's get down to cases. Firstly, there are only seven tracks on this album. That might seem a problem, until you realise two (including the opener) run for over eleven minutes, two shade the ten-minute mark and nothing on this album falls below seven. So overall you're looking at an even longer runtime than the previous album, more than an hour in total. That's not too bad.

Now, as mentioned, the opener is over eleven minutes long. This isn't, as I said, a debut album but it is only Grand Tour's second, so I suppose given the fact that they could probably rely on their no doubt large and loyal fanbase from Comedy of Errors to support them, perhaps it's not as daring a move as our friends This Winter Machine, but it's still impressive. You'll probably be glad to know that it's not an instrumental. I'm not sure even I could take eleven minutes without vocals (though given what I said above, maybe that wouldn't be such a trial).



There is, however, a very slow and gradual fade-in, which makes you feel, for about a minute or more, that maybe you didn't hit the play button, or your headphones aren't plugged in. Eventually though you start to hear sounds, as we pass the two-minute mark (I kid you not!) and the vocals come in, kind of out of nowhere. I have no idea why they need such a long lead-in, making the song perhaps two or three minutes longer than it needs to be, but once it gets going the title track proves to have been worth waiting for. There are nice vocal harmonies in the style of maybe Lindisfarne, Fairport Convention or CSNY, and the song takes off at a nice lick by about the fourth minute. Again, I suppose GT can rely on their Comedy of Errors fans, but even so, I feel this has been something of a gamble. Most people, hearing nothing after a minute, might give up, either in frustration, impatience or bewilderment. Needless to say, I persevered, and was appropriately rewarded for it, and so will you be if you do likewise.

Good guitar work from Mike Spalding, sort of reminds me of the best of Twelfth Night's Andy Revell in places, and so far on this listen Cairney's voice doesn't seem to be grating on me as much as I remember. I do note though that he sounds distinctly foreign (German, Dutch, Finnish, something like that) and not at all like a Scot. He can certainly sing, to be fair. One thing I do find is that in a song of this length I struggle to find a hook, even a chorus. It's perhaps a little unstructured, reminding me of the weaker work of Polish proggers Millenium. Fades out as unobtrusively and unimpressively as it opened. Probably not the greatest way to kick off your album: compare this opener to the triumphant one from This Winter Machine. After this, sure, you're ready to hear more, but are you in two minds?

At just under seven and a half minutes, the next track is, believe it or not, the shortest on the album. “Don't Cry Now” seems to utilise some phasing on the vocals, whether that's an actual vocoder being used or just digital processing on the voices I don't know, but it gives a sort of alien feel to the opening of the song, which sounds like it could be a ballad. Is it too soon for a slow song? TWM certainly didn't seem to think so, though it can be a gamble, throwing one in so early in the album, especially after what came across as a somewhat disorganised opener. Hits into a kind of bluesy swing style half way through, and the song seems to follow the theme of “the show must go on”, the idea of an actor/singer feeling sad or upset but needing to complete the performance, with the warning “Don't cry now for the audience may be watching”. It's a better song, but for my money fails, so far, to lift the album from not quite mediocrity, but maybe banality. They'll need to try much harder.



“Back in the Zone” is another almost twelve-minute epic, with some nice keys from Hew Montgomery leading it in, and at least this time there's no faffing about with two to three minutes of ambient noise and sound effects as the song gets going quickly. There are echoes of Arena here, but I can't shake that folky feeling; it's definitely in the vocals, makes you expect to start hearing accordions and fiddles or something. It's a decent song, but again I must question the length. Does it need to run for twelve minutes? We're in minute seven now and I could see it quite happily ending here. I'd have to say it's stretched out beyond what it need to be. “The Panic” opens a little like “I Want to Dance With Somebody” by Whitney Houston (!) but quickly settles, after the odd percussive intro, down and becomes a, well, almost Duran Duran style song with squealing synths and a chakka-chakka-chakka drumbeat. Tres strange!

A third of the way into its slightly less than nine-minute run and no vocals yet, so I wonder if we're talking instrumental here? I really can't remember: I listened to this album a good deal the first time but it's been about two months since I heard it last and I've listened to a lot of prog albums since then. It's almost – though not quite – as if I'm hearing it for the first time again. But as we're now five minutes in and there's been no singing I think my original idea was correct. An instrumental, and quite an odd one for a prog rock album, very synthpop I feel. Not that it's bad, just unexpected, even to someone who has heard this album many times before. Maybe it wasn't that memorable, though I thought I remembered enjoying it. The next two are both in the ten-minute range, with “Shadow Walking” featuring a long, dramatic, marching instrumental intro which lasts for nearly two and a half minutes before Cairney comes in with the vocal. It seems to focus on the idea of a wasted life, hanging around doing nothing, perhaps pointing obliquely to street gangs and crime.

The hopelessness of a misspent youth come through in lines like “hanging out with faceless friends I've never seen before” and “crazy dreams when you find out life ain't all it seems”. Nice kind of vocal chorus going on there in the midpoint, perhaps a touch of paranoia (justified or not I can't say) and fear in the lyric. A very nice guitar solo then from Spalding, though I would have preferred it to have been longer, and it seems to be superseded then by violin and flute, though I see no credit for players of either so must assume Montgomery is synthesising these on his keyboard.

Seems the next track slipped in without my noticing, and “Game Over” I have to say really doesn't make any proper impression on me. It's not that it's a bad track, I just don't see anything special about it, and again it's far too long. I think the lyrical idea is grappling with conflating an addiction to video games with a broken or breaking-up love affair, but to my mind it's handled clumsily and does not come off. Nice soloing in the sixth or seventh minute, but other than that, not a whole lot to say about it. That leaves us with one before we end, and it's the ballad, “Slumber Sweetly”, and does at least close the album in style. Unfortunately, it can't paper over the cracks which have become more and more visible as I review this.


Songs / Tracks Listing

1. Clocks That Tick (But Never Talk) (11:41)
2. Don't Cry Now (7:27)
3. Back In The Zone (11:50)
4. The Panic (8:56)
5. Shadow Walking (10:14)
6. Game Over (9:48)
7. Slumber Sweetly (8:03)

Total time 67:59

Line-up / Musicians

- Joe Cairney / vocals

- Mark Spalding / guitar

- Hew Montgomery / keyboards

- Chris Radford / bass

- Bruce Levick / drums



I hesitate to keep comparing the two, but I can think of at least four songs I was humming (and able to hum, so able to remember) from A Tower of Clocks after I had finished it, whereas here there really isn't even one that stands out. It's odd really, because as I said I seemed to remember quite enjoying the album, but looking at it now for the first time through the cold dispassionate eye of the reviewer I can see its many flaws. As I mentioned, I'm not at all familiar with Comedy of Errors, but on the basis of this album I wouldn't be in any hurry to check them out.

It's not that it's a bad album at all, it's just it's merely okay, and for me, okay is generally not really good enough. It certainly pales beside This Winter Machine's effort, and if memory serves the one coming up next blows it away too. Perhaps it might be a little snide to say that there's more needed to make a decent prog rock album than a good pun in the title, but I do feel rather let down by this overall, and again, I'm surprised because I had relatively fond recent memories of it.

Rating: 7/10

__________________
Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018