Where Worlds Collide

This rather silly post in The Guardian Music Blog claims that “we are in danger of destroying rock-star mystique because the web is less in thrall to image than traditional media“.

The suggestion is that blogs and social media makes musicians more accessible to fans, and this is somehow a bad thing. I think his real beef is the increasing redundancy of the music journalist as middle-man.

Anyway, I think the whole concept of the “rock star” is overrated. Some of the most sublime music I’ve heard over the past decade has been made by those who, when I’ve got to meet them have turned out to be quite down-to-earth people. The trouble for music journalists, of course, is that they’re less interesting to write about than to listen to. Unfortunately the ‘rock star’ myth is all to often an excuse to justify the sorts of behaviour that no ‘normal’ person would get away with, and ends up with the glorification of sleazy figures like Pete Doherty.

As I’ve said before, in recent years we’ve seen an wider gap between the creative artist and the showbiz celebrity, so it’s the largely talent-free slebs whose antics fill the gossip pages of the tabloids, while musicians are left in peace to do what they’re good at, which is create great music.

And I really don’t have a problem with that.

With EMI apparently about to go belly-up, and Warner Group pulling out of streaming sites (Which strikes me as an act of desperation), we seem to be approaching the endgame of their battle to retain dominance of the music industry.

This post, which exhorts the publishing industry not to go down the same route, explains where the music business went wrong, and how and why the adopted a business model dependent on maximising the sales of the smallest possible roster of artists, and why they determine which new artists will be ‘successes’ in advance by deciding who gets the multi-million pound hype campaign. But along came broadband internet, and it fatally undermined their model. Now someone can go to Spotify, listen to, say, the most recent album by, say, The Killers, and decide it’s not worth buying.

Some people have said that without the major labels and their advances the only recorded music will be cheap and nasty recordings made on laptops in people’s bedrooms. No way will people be able to put together ambitious albums with things like string sections. I point such people at Karnataka’s “The Gathering Light”. Go and listen to the song Moment in Time which the band have made streamable on last.fm. Great production, complete with string sections. Karnataka are not signed to a major label. They’re not even on an indie. “The Gathering Light” is self-released and self-financed. Yes, it cost a quite a bit of money to record, but nevertheless the band managed to raise the money, and didn’t need a record company advance to do it.

But in today’s music climate I cannot imagine an album like that being released on a major label. What will happen is that at some record company marketing meeting chaired by a cloth-eared MBA graduate, they’ll say something like “27.8 percent of our target demographic doesn’t like guitar solos, so all those solos will have to go”. Then it will be “If there are ten minute songs there’s a 17.9% chance the Tesco’s might refuse to sell it”. And so on. The end result will be something bland and homogeneous, sounding like a poor man’s Coldplay.

Music will survive the extinction of the dinosaurs, and in the past decade the mice and birds have been doing perfectly well in their shadow. The past decade may have been one of worst in history as far as the mainstream has been concerned, with record companies putting out nothing but overhyped cookie-cutter pabulum, but below the radar all sorts of music has been flourishing.

There is a lot of misconceptions about prog rock.

I keep hearing things like “It’s all songs about elves and wizards, I want to hear songs about real things”. I’ve even heard that coming from someone who used to be in a band named after a magic sword! It gets labelled as music that punk allegedly saved us from, parroted by generations of music journalists who were too young to have been around in the 1970s. I was amused when The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis reviewed a Genesis reissue, and was amazed to find it was full of tunes! He was about six years old at the time of punk.

The the stigma is such that bands such as Marillion or Porcupine Tree have on occasions loudly denied any connection with the genre, and that’s used by loud, obnoxious factions within at least one fanbase to bash anyone that dares to like such ‘uncool’ music.

As Electric Hedgehog wisely said, genre definitions should be shared tools, not weapons of conflict. ,

So what exactly is ‘prog’ nowadays? If you look at artists that have featured in Classic Rock Presents Prog over the past few months, ‘Prog’ covers artists as diverse as Radiohead, Kate Bush, Opeth and The Mars Volta. All of whom sound absolutely nothing like each other whatsoever. Prog is something that’s not easy to define, but you often know it when you hear it. Sometimes there are the obvious markers like lengthy songs, Mellotrons, 7/8 time signatures, and that overdriven guitar sound favoured by many guitarists in the genre. But none of those are anything like universal, and indeed some of them are so clichéd that many bands try to avoid them. What present-day bands do have in common are musical ambitions that extend beyond the three minute pop songs, a greater level of musical dexterity and complexity than is common in indie bands, and far more light and shade than you see in most metal. The majority of today’s prog bands take at least some musical influences from non-chart music from the period between 1968 and 1975, or thereabouts, which in turn took influences from jazz, folk and especially classical music alongside those from earlier rock and pop.

Some bands, like for example IQ stick pretty closely to a template established in the first half of the 1970s by bands like Van der Graaf Generator and especially Genesis, but succeed by doing it well enough to transcend being a mere pastiche. Other bands, such as The Pineapple Thief take a more streamlined modern sound with a very song-orientated approach. Sweden’s Opeth started out as a straight death metal band before incorporating influences from 70s British bands such as Camel into their sound. And I can’t not mention Mostly Autumn, whose influences range from Pink Floyd to classic rock bands like Fleetwood Mac and Deep Purple. All these bands, to my ears, fall within the broad genre of prog, whether they choose to accept the label or not.

Yes, like any other genre, Sturgeon’s Law applies. There’s quite a bit of what I’ve described as ‘Euro landfill prog’ out there, directionless jams produced by people who are clearly competent musicians but don’t seem to know anything much about composition or putting any emotional depth into their music. And I won’t deny there are unimaginative retreads of earlier, better bands in much the same was as many landfill indie bands make unimaginative pastiches of The Kinks or The Jam.

But surely no genre deserves to be judged by it’s most mediocre contributors, but by those that represent the best the genre has to offer.

Ian Jones came in for a lot of criticism when he revived the Karnataka name in 2005. The previous incarnation of the celtic-flavoured progressive rock band had imploded a year earlier just at the point where they seemed to be poised for a major breakthrough. The new-look Karnataka played some live dates in 2007 with just Ian Jones on bass remaining from the original band, which led some critics to dismiss them as a ‘glorified tribute band’, despite a fair proportion of new material in the setlist, including the memorable title track for their forthcoming album “The Gathering Light”.

In the end it would be another three years before that album would finally see the light of day, but when it finally emerged, it’s exceeded all expectations. The original band was great on atmospherics, but the new Karnataka have gone and done an album of the sort of hugely epic symphonic prog I haven’t heard done this well since Marillion’s “Brave”. The sound is massive and multilayered with impassioned vocals and soaring guitars augmented by guest appearances from Hugh McDowell of ELO fame on cello, Troy Donockley’s distinctive Uilleann pipes, and a string quartet on a couple of songs.

Lisa Fury has always impressed me as a live singer, her studio vocal performances here have just the right balance between emotional depth and technical precision that distinguish a great singer from a merely good one. But for me the real revelation is Enrico Pinna’s guitar playing; prog guitar at it’s finest, with occasional echoes of Steve Hackett or Pendragon’s Nick Barratt, but a symphonic style that’s still his own.

The album starts with two instrumentals, the short but evocative “The Calling” featuring Troy’s pipes, followed by the lengthy workout “State of Grace“. The string-laden ballad “Moment in Time” is one song that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on “Delicate Flame of Desire”, and again features Troy’s pipes, along with some great slide guitar from Enrico. The three-part epic “Forsaken” is perhaps the high spot of the album, tremendously moving vocals from Lisa Fury on the opening section, the symphonic instrumental “Glowing Embers” flowing seamlessly back into a reprise of the opening part. Lots of prog bands have attempted epics like that over the years, but very few succeed as magnificently.

It’s been a long time coming, but Karnataka have delivered the first essential progressive rock album of 2010.

Previous Mostly Autumn live albums have been something of a disappointment. There have been quite a few, and they’ve all too frequently been poor-quality recordings that have failed to capture the power and beauty of York’s finest progressive rock band a live setting.

The two disks comprising Live 2009 are a quite different prospect. Recorded over a number of dates on the spring 2009 tour, this time they’ve really managed to capture what it was like to be in the front row at one of the those electrifying gigs. They’ve taken care in mixing and mastering so that you can hear every instrument and voice from the eight-piece live band clearly, from Bryan Josh’s Gilmouresque guitar to Anne-Marie Helder’s flute and Olivia Sparnenn’s backing vocals. The end result simply blows every previous Mostly Autumn live release out of the water.

They’ve very sensibly decided to release the entire show bar an ill-advised cover played as the final encore. Somewhat controversially it’s being sold as two separate disks rather than a double-CD, but I’ve reviewing both of them together.

Part I, the shorter of the two disks comprises the first set of the band’s live show, and largely showcases songs with Heather Findlay singing lead. Opening hard rocker “Fading Colours” is vastly superior to the studio version from “Heart Full of Sky” and sets the tone for the rest of the set, right through to the mesmerising closing number, Heather’s signature song “Evergreen”. I’ve always found that song a sort of modern-day version of “Freebird”. An unexpected highlight is Heather’s “Unoriginal Sin”, the song from the recent “Glass Shadows” transformed into an immensely-powerful emotionally-charged piece of music. The harmonies from Olivia Sparnenn and Anne-Marie Helder show just what a band with three top-class female singers is capable of.

Part II carries on where the first disk left off, starting after the interval and including the encore, which makes it significantly longer than part I. It’s more of a balance between the two singers, with more of Bryan Josh’s vocals on songs like the electric folk-rock of “Winter Mountain” and “The Dark Before The Dawn” and of course the epic encore “Heroes Never Die”, with that flute intro from Anne-Marie Helder that never fails to raise the hairs on the back of the neck. Heather’s vocals shine again on the sparse-but-beautiful “Above the Blue”, and the magnificent set-closer “Carpe Diem” culminating in the intertwining vocal and guitar lines building to a symphonic wall of sound. We’ve also got Heather and Olivia performing “Never the Rainbow” as a duet, closing with Olivia’s voice duelling with Bryan Josh’s guitar.

I thought at the time that the 2009 line up of Mostly Autumn was the best live incarnation of the band I’ve ever heard; the return of Iain Jennings on keys and Liam Davidson on second guitar filled out the sound, and Gavin Griffiths on drums added a boost to the energy level that was missing from previous tours. And while Heather Findlay has always been my favourite female vocalist, she lifted her singing to a new level; pouring her entire heart and soul into songs like “Unoriginal Sin” and “Carpe Diem”. With Heather now announcing her departure from the band to embark upon a solo career, these two disks are a fitting way to mark what has turned out to be the end of an era.

The albums can be ordered online from Mostly Autumn Records.

This album came out at the end of last year, but although I commented extensively on message boards about how good it was, I was too busy at the time to write a proper review. This review is therefore better late than never.