Warthur
X would be Nick D'Virgilio's final album both as the frontman of Spock's Beard - a role he stepped into after the departure of Neal Morse after Snow - as well as full-time drummer, a role he'd held since the band's beginning. (He would eventually come back after his replacement, Jimmy Keegan, left, serving both as a live drummer and guesting in the drum spot on Noise Floor.)
Though the consensus on it seems to be pretty positive, for me it just doesn't quite click the way the other Nick-fronted albums did. Once again, the band are taking a fairly magpie approach to prog, grabbing bits and pieces from other genres as the mood takes them; a song might be chugging along in a fairly contemporary rock vein before abruptly incorporating a Gentle Giant-esque bit of intertwined vocals, for instance.
It's the "abruptly" that was the stumbling block here: at first the compositions just didn't hang together to my ears, with there being a few too many moments where the band are casting about and throwing everything at the wall in the hope that something sticks. I mentioned the Gentle Giant comparisons quite deliberately there, because that was an influence the band wore on their sleeves in the Neal Morse years but had been downplayed since. Here, Spock's Beard seem to be cannibalising themselves a little; some might welcome this because there's more sections here reminiscent of their first six albums than we've heard for a while, but to my taste - even after giving the album a few more chances and coming to like it better - it comes perilously close to Spock's Beard cannibalising itself
Eventually, though, my ear got used to the sheer range of sounds that Spock's Beard throw at the wall here and I ended up reconsidering my opinion. In fact, the compositions here might be tighter than they've been since Neal left - it's just that there's so much stuffed crammed into here that it can be easy to miss that. I don't think it's a flat-out classic for that reason, but I do think it's very easy to underestimate.