Album Title: X
Artist: Spock's Beard
Nationality: U.S.
Year: 2010
Subgenre: Modern prog?
Player(s): Nick D'Virgilio (Drums & Lead Vocals), Alan Morse (Guitars, Backing Vocals), Ryo Okumoto (Keyboards), Dave Meros (Bass, Additional Backing Instrumentation)
Familiarity: I have a lot of these guys' output. Even heard most of 'X' before but never added it to my collection.
Favourite track(s): “Edge Of The In-Between”
Why? Spock's Beard have an interesting habit on their albums of starting with their strongest songs. This particular epic gives me major 'Calling All Stations' vibes in a positive way, plus those keyboards are awesome. There's some great guitar and an excellent rhythm propelling this sucker too, which makes it good enough for the highway in my book, lol!
Least favourite track(s): "Their Names Escape Me"
Why? It's not bad musically, but the middle part of the song where Nick starts singing the names of all the people who contributed to the album's pre-ordering campaign is just plain dumb no matter how you slice it.
Any preconceptions prior to listening, whether good or bad? I thought it would be an interesting album for sure: Spock's Beard are many things, but uninteresting isn't one of them.
Factoids you'd like to share? This was the last album featuring Nick singing lead vocals and drumming, and the band's music has suffered a bit since his departure I'm afraid.
End impression: 'X' sits somewhere in the upper 30% quality-wise of SB's overall output: it's not as good as 'V' or 'Snow' or 'The Kindness Of Strangers', but its better than 'Beware Of Darkness' or the self-titled by a long shot (and other albums I haven't mentioned). It's a great entry point into the band's overall sound, especially since the opening cut, 'From The Darkness' and even the monolithic 'Jaws Of Heaven' work pretty well as epics. Ryo is great on the keys and Hammond as usual and Nick is a pretty capable frontman. Very few drummers out there are skilled enough to fill the frontman role whilst still managing to serve as the band's rythmic backbone, and in that respect he's the strongest element of this post-Neal Morse lineup. A shame he left after this one, though
Big Big Train have benefited immensely from his presence since then.
Rating: 3.5. This is a rock solid example of semi-modern progressive rock and a nice entry point to SB even if it doesn't really qualify as a masterpiece. Good stuff!