Published on Jun 29, 2005
Dammit, I wanted to be nice to this CD. I really did.
See,
I like Spock’s Beard. (Duh, sayeth
the regular readers of the DV.) I like ’em a lot. And I wanted to
be wrong, a few years ago, when I said Neal Morse leaving the band
would make them just another progressive rock band — nothing
special, nothing wonderful. I’ll state it again, for posterity; I
wanted to be wrong.
If their new CD,
Octane, is any indication, I wasn’t wrong.
Octane is, frankly, a muddle. It’s disjointed, uneven, and
lacking in anything resembling musical cohesion. While there are
individual bright spots, taken together the CD has no unity. When
you factor in that most of the CD is supposed to be a theme album,
a single musical work — well. It doesn’t work.
Let’s cover the good stuff first. Production and engineering are
magnificent. (It’s a great sounding train wreck in places.) The
musicianship is elegant, fantastic, and brilliant as usual. Give
the Beard credit; they even manage to restrain Ryo Okumoto from
sounding quite so much like
Point Of Know Return-era Kansas when he hits the
keyboards.
Where Octane fails are the songs. I’m sorry, maybe I’m a spoiled
brat, but when a band’s portfolio includes incredible things like
“Wind At My Back,” “Ghosts Of Autumn,” “Waste Away” and “Distance
To The Sun,” I expect better than cliché-fests like “Surfing
Down The Avalance” and “As Long As We Ride.” Nominally, the first
half of the CD is an examination of someone’s life literally
flashing before their eyes as they’re dying, and I understand that
may require language a little less poetic than Snow – but a lot of
the tracks on Octane are, plain and simple, boring, flat, and
weak.
It’s not all bad. There are some good tracks on
Octane — I really liked “She Is Everything” and “There Was
A Time” — but the ultimate test is this; there are eleven tracks
from
Snow on my iPod. There is one from
Octane. Coming from a band that is either my first or second
favorite, depending on the day, that’s pretty damn sad.
I wish there was some way I could recommend
Octane. I wish Neal Morse hadn’t found Jesus. I wish a lot
of things. Most notably, I wish that I hadn’t wasted twenty bucks
on this CD. For an album that’s about life flashing before one’s
eyes,
Octane is already pretty dead.