PENDRAGON — Passion (review)

Album · 2011 · Metal Related

3/5 · 2021-12-01
Warthur

Kicking off the opening title track of this album with a sampled drum loop before Nick Barrett's lead guitar kicks in, Pendragon signal to the listener immediately that Passion, as with Pure, is going to be another wild ride into territory outside of that which we'd come to associate with the band, especially on the strength of their output from The World to Not Of This World.

Repeated motifs and lyrical phrases suggest that there's a concept going on here, but largely the album seems to be a moment of therapy for Nick Barrett, a venting of frustrations which you get the impression had been a long time coming. Now, it's the nature of such venting to include things that aren't so reasonable (come on, Nick, don't buy into the tabloid TV idea of a "war on Christmas", you're smarter than that), but maybe this is part of the point: passion, after all, is exuberant and wild and difficult to control and not exactly rational.

In interviews Nick Barrett's been pretty open about how his divorce, which occurred in between The Masquerade Overture and Not Of This World, was something of a major shakeup in his life and prompted him to re-evaluate a lot of things, and in retrospect it's easy to see how the run of albums after Masquerade Overture reflect that. Not Of This World, whilst still in the style the band had been performing since The World, included a melancholic edge to proceedings suggesting that the joyful optimism and innocence that had characterised preceding albums had been shaken; Believe and Pure found the band exploring increasingly dark material, expanding their emotional repertoire in order to give expression to correspondingly dark feelings.

Passion, then, would seem to be the culmination of that process, a cry from the heart that Nick and the band had been developing the musical and lyrical toolkit to unleash on the world, and as a result it feels like one of the most genuine, honest, and raw albums in the neo-prog landscape, expressing an honesty which at its best is comparable to Fish in his finest moments as a lyricist, but at its worst is alienating and bitter.

Perhaps you don't have to agree with everything Nick is saying here to find value in this album - again, this is Passion, not Reason: one way or another, this is what's in Nick's heart, and now it's out of his heart and on the record you get the impression that a real weight has been lifted from him. Towards the end of the album things get a bit more gentle - with catharsis attained, a new beginning can be planned, and a touch of that old optimism can come back. At the same time, the axe-grinding can get somewhat wearing, with the number of right-wing dogwhistles packed into This Green and Pleasant Land bordering on the obnoxious, and the musical backing ultimately finding Pendragon once again starting to repeat themselves, after Pure had done such a good job of shifting them into a new approach.