SPOCK'S BEARD — Snow Live (review)

Live album · 2017 · Metal Related

5/5 · 2022-09-28
Warthur

It was one of the biggest shocks to hit the early 2000s prog scene: no sooner had Spock's Beard released Snow, an ambitious double concept album, band leader Neal Morse (who had composed a substantial majority of their material to date - including almost all of Snow) quit. His declared reason at the time was that he wanted to focus his time on making solo work exploring his religious beliefs, and didn't think it would be right to expect the band to follow him down that particular rabbithole; as he would later allude to on the Testimony 2 concept album, a health scare involving his young daughter may well have prompted him to want to pull out of band projects altogether and stay at home more. Ambitious plans to perform Snow live were shelved, never to see fulfillment...

...until 2016, that is. After shocking the prog world by quitting all his existing band projects in 2002, Neal shocked it again in 2009 by returning to band work, reforming Transatlantic. Between that, the brand new Flying Colors project, and The Neal Morse Band (in which, despite the name, songwriting duties are shared much more evenly than on Neal's solo albums), it became evident that Neal was now comfortable with working as part of a band again, even on projects which didn't have an overt, explicitly stated Christian focus.

He'd even make appearances with Spock's Beard, joining them onstage at a festival or two and even making contributions to the Brief Nocturnes and Dreamless Sleep album, though being careful to be credited as a guest rather than a full member of the band. This was a classy move, because that album was the debut of Ted Leonard as the group's full-time frontman (after filling in for a departing Nick D'Virgilio on some live gigs), and it's clear that whilst Neal was happy to stop by to help out, he was also humble enough not to upstage the new singer right when he needed that spotlight.

Snow Live, however, represents perhaps the biggest and most significant reunion of Neal and Spock's Beard to date: a full live performance of the album, performed at Morsefest. (Morsefest is Neal's homegrown fan convention, a bit like his version of Marillion's weekend bashes - one likes to think of him chatting with his Transatlantic bandmate Pete Trewavas between takes in the studio, picking his brains about the logistics of running such things.) This consists of the full Snow epic, plus two encores - old favourite June and Falling Forever, a track previously recorded by Neal and Spock's Beard for the First Twenty Years compilation album.

Inevitably, such an undertaking involves Neal being prominently featured front and centre - a de facto reunion, even if just for this show (and a repeat in Europe a short while later). Snow was an extremely personal concept for him - it's basically him working through his feelings about quitting the band before he actually quit the band, he wrote almost all the music and lyrics, that's just inevitable.

Nonetheless, Neal and the band do a grand job of making the show less about Neal coming back and acting as frontman for one more night, and more about a celebration of the band's entire history. Far from sitting this one out, Ted Leonard is included in the show, the group doing a fine job of finding ways for him to contribute some lead performances as well as assisting with the backing vocals where it would serve the concept to do so. Likewise, Nick D'Virgilio came back for this gig, with the band using a two-drummer setup to allow him and Jimmy Keegan to play together, and he also contributes some vocals too in keeping with his role of frontman for the run of albums between Neal leaving and Ted Leonard joining.

(Having multiple vocalists on hand, in fact, turns out to be not just a bonus, but essential - after all, as with much early Spock's Beard stuff, there's some moments where they get into intricately intertwined vocals reminiscent of some of Gentle Giant's experiments in that vein; you might be able to do that solo in a studio by multi-tracking your voice, but you need a bunch of vocalists on hand to do that live!)

In other words, the album doesn't just include Neal Morse playing with Spock's Beard again - it also includes every single person who'd been an official member of Spock's Beard on a studio album up to this point. (Original bassist John Ballard isn't on it, but John was only in the band fairly briefly, departing before they recorded The Light.) The result is a performance of Snow which is somewhat warmer than the chilly title implies - and it works an absolute treat. Some credit has to be given to the delightful acoustics of the venue - it's Neal's local church, which gives the whole thing a nice, intimate sound, and on the whole I actually think the resulting performance sounds better than the rather clean, precisely-produced studio album.

The execution is absolutely spot on; despite the fact that neither Spock's Beard nor Neal's solo backing bands have performed all this material like this, they really nail it, like they've been playing this setlist regularly since Snow originally released. Or perhaps it sounds even better than that - maybe letting the material sit fallow for this long gave Neal and the group the appetite to really get their teeth into it now this wonderful opportunity had arisen. The fact that they deliberately only planned to play this show a very limited number of times, rather than doing a full Spock's Beard And Neal Morse Play Snow tour, might have also added a certain helpful frisson - nothing like knowing that you've got limited chances to get this right to focus the mind!

Of course, it'd be foolish to write off the possibility that Neal and Spock's Beard will perform this set again in future, or otherwise collaborate again - the very existence of this live album proves that all bets are off and "never say never" should be one's motto. But at the same time, if this is the last major collaboration between the two parties and it's just occasional guest appearances on a song here and there from here on out, this is a magnificent way for the Neal Morse-fronted incarnation of Spock's Beard to bow out, and does a fantastic job of providing the closure we never got back in 2002.