Chris Legg review
Progressive rock. It's all men in capes playing interminable keyboard solos in 17/16 time, isn't it? And late-night music shows on BBC2 featuring that bloke who never spoke above a whisper for fear of distracting the musicians from their...erm...standing around waiting to play? And someone building a big fuck-off wall onstage out of oversized Lego bricks?
Yes. And no. Because prog was also about talented musicians wanting to stretch their imaginations, and their abilities, to the very limit. Wanting to tell more of a story than you could fit into three verses, a chorus and a middle-eight. Wanting to take the listener to places that no three-minute blast of adrenaline, however Beatles-y or Stones-y or Kinks-y, could ever quite reach.
I said "prog was". I should have said "prog is, because prog, ladies and gentlemen, is alive and well, and you don't have to be into inflatable pigs, or capes, or even the more mundane aspects of bad '70s fashion, to get the full effect. It enjoys its rude health thanks, in no small part, to four guys from Tasmania who call themselves "The Third Ending" (but before that "Theory of Everything", and before that "Pacifier", and before that "Theory of Everything" again...but that's a story for another time) and have, after nearly two years and a lot of effort sandwiched between their various working days, produced an album of the same name.
Yes, there are funny time signatures. In fact, there's one underpinning the intricate acoustic arpeggios that are our introduction to opener "Eleven", so named because large swathes of it are in...guess! And the lyrics, while solid, and with some bona fide flashes of inspiration (my own favourite is the opening couplet from "Can you hear me?", "Spent the last two years dividing/Seems she wants to multiply"), can't really be said to stay too far from the prog staple: the first words heard, after all, are "Silent for so long inside your cage/Tell me, how does it feel to take the blame?"
But somehow it all gels to produce a whole that is challenging but incredibly listenable, not least because of guitarist Andrew Curtis' mastery of the whole gamut of what his instrument(s) can do: choppy metal riffing on "Eleven", soaring, sustained melody on "Back Home" and virtuoso (but stopping short of self-indulgent) fret-work on "Tungsten Blues" - and that's just the first three tracks covered! And lead singer Nick Storr's voice is a versatile instrument too, moving with ease from the grunge-y snarl of the opener's verse to Keane-like near-operatics of its chorus and ending up, in "Coming Around", in full-on Jon Bon Jovi (if Jon Bon was really, really good) rock god mode. But engaging in the traditional rock-hack laziness of just focusing on lead singer and guitarist seems particularly unfair here: the playing of drummer Andrew Knott and bassist Cornel Ianculovici (not forgetting Storr's own keyboard-pounding) is accomplished throughout, and the whole would be so much less than it is if deprived of any of its parts.
So most of the prog buttons are duly pushed (the use of answer-phone effects on "Can You Hear Me?" is surely a deliberate nod to "The Wall"), literally so in the case of the spooky samples with which "Cold Light Of Day" segues into "Falling", in which Storr's electronically-treated moan confesses, "Opened myself up, thought the words would come so easily/But I found a hollow; I think that's where I lost my sanity". But the whole thing could so easily have toppled over a precipice of po-facedness, particularly with "Eleven" being followed immediately by the earnestness of "Back Home" (key lyric: "It took a lifetime to find you/And I don't want to wake up from this dream"), were it not for the band's possession of that rarest of prog commodities: a sense of humour. "Tungsten Blues" is an instrumental, yet gets its very own set of "lyrics" in the sleeve notes, in which the metal's virtues are given the full tongue-incheek treatment. And a minute or two after closer "Fingerprints (Reprise)" has exultantly faded out, it suddenly fades back in again, this time playing "All You Need Is Love"-era Beatles at their own game by adorning itself with impressions of Macca doing "Hey Jude" before grinding to a deliberately ramshackle halt.
There are passages that are genuinely moving, too, and these are often when the sentiments expressed are at their simplest. The second verse of "Can You Hear Me" goes: "She lies awake beside him, drifting in and out of sleep/She feels the coldness growing with every broken beat/So she reads aloud the headlines, hoping that he's heard/She says she loves him, he doesn't say a word." And the triumph of "Fingerprints (Reprise)" is made that much more meaningful by the preceding "Coming Around" in which Storr asks, his piano in full "Imagine" mode: "You found your way back to this place/And realised that, all along/You had to come back here to move on/Did you find that you had grown/Have you come into your own?"
A quick word about the sleeve design, the brainchild of the clearly multi-talented drummer. Lovers of innovative sleeves should buy this album on that basis alone. The CD inlay is clear plastic, and the lyrics are printed with seemingly random words highlighted in such a way that they combine to spell out "T3E" when the inlay is viewed from the front. But even if such novelties don't even remotely float your boat, and all you want to do is hear ambitious music played with genuine flair, and the promising beginnings of what could grow to be a very bright musical star indeed, then I would still urge you to go to www.thethirdending.com and buy, buy, buy!
- Chris Legg, freelance writer (UK)