Warthur The first Neal Morse Band album was a departure from Neal's usual writing process, because he and the band went into the studio with nothing prepared whatsoever, a situation which demanded that everyone step up to the plate and offer creative contributions - a real shift from Neal's previous approach in his solo career (and during his leadership of Spock's Beard), which entailed writing almost all the material himself.

The second album, The Similitude of a Dream, saw Neal working out a concept and broad structure for the album, and then the band as a whole worked out on fleshing out those bones. This was refreshing in its own right, because it was still a very band-oriented process, but at the same time ensured that there was more overarching structure than on The Grand Experiment.

For this sequel to The Similitude of a Dream, Neal seems to have gone back to his old way of working - presenting the band with some two and a half hours of demos for the concept. These would then be workshopped rigorously; the final album weighs in at about 100 minutes, meaning a fair amount had to be cut. Neal's acknowledged that these cuts were sometimes painful, with everyone involved needing to lose bits they loved, but the end result is a release which is broadly in line with the general approach of Neal's earlier solo career (at least in terms of the prog albums), but has been subjected to sufficiently ruthless editing to keep things tight.

I think the later stretches album are a bit stronger musically than the earliest, which are a little too "business as usual" for Neal, but on further reflection I actually think that sneakily a somewhat neat structure which suits the concept - the album starts out in Neal's comfort zone and then he and the band go out into the hinterlands as things progress.

As far as the concept goes, as mentioned it's a sequel to The Similitude of a Dream, which was based on The Pilgrim's Progress. It's not a spurious, tacked-on sequel, mind; Bunyan's original novel consists of two parts, the titular Pilgrim's journey, and then the journey of the family he left behind to join him in the wonderful realm he's discovered. For the first album, Neal and the Band just dealt with the first part - which meant the second part was ripe for exploration on this album, as a sort of companion piece to the first.

This was an instance where Neal had to persuade the band a little - initially he and the group had been satisfied with Similitude, and were happy to leave Bunyan there and move on to other things - but the end results are on a par with the preceding album, and just shows that having this tight band around him continues to do Neal Morse a world of good. Even though this was largely sprung on them as a fait accompli, you can still detect touches here and there which feel more reminiscent of Neal Morse Band work than Neal Morse solo work, as it were - fleeting moments which don't seem necessarily what Neal would have come up with by himself - but at the same time, the shift in approach means that when the three Neal Morse Band albums up to this point are considered, each has its unique and distinctive character and none of them seem superfluous or redundant.