PENDRAGON — Love Over Fear (review)

PENDRAGON — Love Over Fear album cover Album · 2020 · Non-Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
3/5 ·
Warthur
After spending the 1980s with one foot in neo-prog and another foot in poppier material, with all the stylistic shifts that such a stance implies, Pendragon would shift gear in the 1990s and establish what many think of as the "classic" Pendragon sound - a melodic style of neo-prog in which Clive Nolan's synthesiser textures create a dramatic backdrop against which Nick Barrett's emotionally resonant guitar work unfolds.

This is a style that premiered on The World, was perfected on The Window of Life and The Masquerade Overture, and in retrospect you can see Not Of This World as the close of this phase of the band. Believe, whilst it still had significant elements of this style, saw the band incorporating fresher ideas into their toolbox, whilst Pure, Passion, and Men Who Climb Mountains have all sounded very different from their 1990s material (and with an increasingly grumpy streak in the previously fairly positive lyrics).

Now, after a long percolation, the new album comes - Love Over Fear - and it feels like it marks the completion of the process of musical experimentation and development the band began after Not Of This World. Not because it is the furthest they have gone from their 1990s style - but because it's the closest they have come to a return to it since that album came out.

In addition, there's a consciously retro approach to the album which can't help but feel like Pendragon shifting gear into being the sort of nostalgia act they were accused of being in earlier phases of their career. The opening track, Everything, sounds like a psych number from the 1960s in its early stages before it shifts gear into more typical Pendragon fare, with some grumpy and unpleasant lyrics about how Kids Use Their Phones Too Much These Days. Elsewhere the band feel happy taking moments to step back and go for a more minimalist approach (as on Starfish and the Moon).

To be fair, at its best it feels like the album's offering nods to all the different shores that Pendragon have washed up on over the years, whilst keeping the heart of the material rooted in their classic style at least in terms of following the "melodic, emotional neo-prog" niche they had carved out for themselves. At its worst, however, the album feels a little cluttered and unfocused, with lyrics that sometimes veer into a sort of patronising grumpiness that kind of spoils it for me.

When I first heard the album, towards the start of lockdown, I was very taken with it; I think it's still an OK late-career Pendragon album, but late-career Pendragon hasn't held up for me as well as the likes of late-career Marillion, IQ, or Spock's Beard have.
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