SPOCK'S BEARD — The Light (review)

Album · 1995 · Non-Metal

5/5 · 2021-11-23
Warthur

The Light finds the brothers Morse, their anagrammatic buddy Meros, and Nick D'Virgilio setting off on a prog adventure which, despite its twists and turns, hasn't come to an end yet.

Sure, Ryo Okumoto hasn't joined the lineup yet - but just look at where the core musicians on this debut album have gone since The Light was released. These days, Alan Morse and Dave Meros are still providing the bedrock of continuity underpinning the current lineup of the band, Nick D'Virgilio has helped take Big Big Train to new levels of success (and once had a quick side gig in a small group you've probably never heard of called Genesis...), and Neal Morse is a one-man musical cottage industry, not only helming his own diverse solo career but also playing a key role in a range of acclaimed side projects like Transatlantic and Flying Colors.

No matter how you cut it, between the four men that's an impressive CV in the prog world, and you can certainly make the case that it was The Light which launched them on those respective trajectories. But is it an album of only historic interest, or does it still hold up today? I'm glad to report that it does.

Consisting of three fairly epic compositions and the closing On the Edge, which at six minutes is practically terse compared to the other material here, the album certainly wasn't out to win people over with slick, commercially-oriented material that fit the conceits at the time. At the same time, I think it would be wrong to lump this in with the sort of retro-prog which is out to merely replicate the approach of the 1970s masters of the form.

Sure, there's obviously parallels you can here - if you imagined a sort of mashup of Gentle Giant and Kansas and then added the theatricality of Genesis you wouldn't be completely off-base - but there's more to it here. It was Neal Morse who composed the vast majority of the material here, and if there's one thing that's very obvious from Morse's overall discography is that he's a man of broad musical tastes who likes to be able to perform in a wide range of different styles. Just as Neal's output without the backing of the beard has run the range from pop rock to symphonic prog to devotional Christian music to Beatles covers and beyond, so too does he work an intriguing range of musical influences into the compositions here.

There's the deep bench of prog predecessors to take inspiration from, of course - and that's where the centre of gravity lies - but you also get poppier moments, snatches of Latin music, and more besides. Crucially Neal doesn't seem to have completely ignored what's been going on with more modern musical styles as well. Don't get me wrong: Spock's Beard aren't a prog metal band and they certainly show no sign of becoming one here, but there's moments with a bit more crunch to them here which suggests that Neal wasn't entirely writing off the harder, heavier end of then-current alternative rock. (This is particularly apparent in some of the ways his vocals are produced in some parts.)

There's also something of the torch song or the off-Broadway musical in some portions of the proceedings here - perhaps unsurprisingly, since before Spock's Beard came together Morse had applied himself to writing a couple of musicals (Homeland and Hitman), which would go unproduced until he knocked out renditions of them for his Inner Circle fanclub. The Water, in particular, feels a bit like sections of a musical strung together in a sort of "best of" condensation, rather than a more typical prog approach.

This can mean that sometimes things come across a little cheesy, in the way that musical theatre often is, and not all of the musical sections here are as proggy as all that even if the song structures certainly are. Then again, I think a knack many of the original prog bands often had - and which some of the proggier-than-thou high-technicality groups out there sometimes miss - was a capacity to go simple at the right moment, rather than err for unceasing complexity all the time.

One could even argue that The Light represents a sort of American heartland equivalent of Script For a Jester's Tear and other products of the UK's neo-prog wave in the 1980s, in the sense that it's a prog album put out by musicians who'd grown up listening to the original wave of prog artists but who added some modern sensibilities to the formula. The distinction is that whereas Marillion were able to hit the big time when most of the band were in their twenties, most of Spock's Beard were in their thirties when it all came together for them here. Both albums were put out there in a musical environment where prog rarely troubled the commercial radar, and found success.

Of course, there's differences. Marillion stormed the charts quickly; Spock's Beard took longer to build up a head of steam. Nonetheless, they wouldn't have been able to get that momentum going to begin with had The Light not been as good as it is.