TRANSATLANTIC — Bridge Across Forever (review)

TRANSATLANTIC — Bridge Across Forever album cover

Album · 2001 · Metal Related

5/5 · 2022-02-14
Warthur

It took me a long while to see the appeal of Transatlantic. Bridge Across Forever, when I first heard it, sounded a lot like their debut album, which meant that to my ears it sounded a bit like a lot of bits which fell off the back of a Flower Kings or Spock's Beard album and weren't especially missed.

Perhaps I'm coming around to it now because I've found myself warming to Spock's Beard and the Flower Kings, or maybe it's that I have a better ear for what they are doing differently here. The original SMPTe did, admittedly, sound a little like "Spock's Beard by other means", largely because of the major role Neal Morse played in the compositional approach; this can be explained in part by the fact that the Transatlantic project began with Morse and Portnoy getting together, and Roine Stolt and Peter Trewavas were later additions to the lineup.

This time around, things feel a bit more balanced. Mike Portnoy's letting rip on the drums a bit more and adding just a touch more fire, whilst Stolt and Morse's songwriting contributions seem to do a better job of finding an interesting common ground between Spock's Beard and the Flower Kings, so the music still sounds somewhat similar to both bands but a) there's a bit more Kings in the mix (note how Morse and Stolt share lead vocals on Duel With the Devil!) and b) the band feels like they are breaking into a niche which those two groups occasionally touch on but don't dwell in exclusively. (Indeed, some of the Flower Kings-ish moments on here, like the soaring conclusion to Duel With the Devil, end up pulling off the emotional side of the equation better than the Kings do.)

What of Trewavas? Well, there isn't really much of the Marillion sound here - neither in terms of what the band were doing at around the same time (the sessions for this came about at around the same time as the final touches were being put on Anoraknophobia) or way back in the Fish era. Perhaps the closest comparison I could draw with Pete's "home" band is the way that the band's sound seems somehow fresher and more modern than that of Spock's Beard or the Flower Kings, even though there's just as much 1970s worship going on here as in those two bands.

Then there's that instrumental section midway through Duel With the Devil which incorporates jazzy saxophone, spacey guitar, and feels like it might slip all the way into being a prog-trip hop mashup like Marillion's Interior Lulu or Cathedral Wall before it breaks back again - and come to think of it, there's enough 1960s pop influences in Morse-era Spock's Beard and late 1990s Marillion that there's that point of connection too. And the jamming at the start of Suite Charlotte Pike is absolutely held together by his bass line, as well as coming across like some of Marillion's poppier numbers from this era - it could have just as easily come off Radiation, come to think of it.

It's really only Dream Theater's sound which is less represented here, and that's largely because the centre of gravity of the album is very much in the realm of progressive rock, not progressive metal. At the same time, it's possible to get too hung up on the individual ingredients which go into this stew and lose sight of the main attraction, which is how the album successfully merges these sounds together into a seamless whole.

With Transatlantic finally finding their sound here, it would have been a crushing shame had Neal Morse's subsequent withdrawal from many of his previous musical projects caused the band to end forever. Fortunately, Neal would see a way forward to balance his spiritual commitments with re-engagement with old projects (as well as reuniting Transatlantic, he's made the odd guest appearance with Spock's Beard), but if he hadn't, this would have been an astonishing note for the supergroup project to go out on.