PATTERN SEEKING ANIMALS - ONLY PASSING THROUGH
Mixed bag from Spock’s Beard offshoot.
Only Passing Through is the new album by the American collective featuring producer, songwriter, and keyboardist John Boegehold who has collaborated with Spock’s Beard and his buddies from that band, Ted Leonard, Jimmy Keegan, and Dave Meros. This album has, perhaps not surprisingly given the personnel, garnered some extremely positive and high rating reviews in the world of prog, and I was interested in how I would find it, especially as I thoroughly enjoyed the other (partially) Beard-related spin-off from D’Virgilio, Morse, and Jennings.
This album is far more prog leaning. The musicianship throughout is never anything less than excellent, as would be expected from the personnel delivering it, although I have to say that I don’t appreciate greatly the often too present swirling keyboards which sound like a Wurlitzer on speed, but that is a personal thing. In addition, I find much of it light, without any real passion or force behind it. A good example is the second track, I Can’t Stay Here Anymore, which has pretensions to anthemic heights, but simply never gets to scale them and ends up as a rather “by numbers” prog-lite number the like of which has been done so much better elsewhere, although the closing passage with its vocal harmonies does lift it up somewhat.
There is an epic length track here, the 13-minute plus Time Has A Way which 2:40 minutes in has those drug-induced Wurlitzer sounds which rather spoil a faintly interesting start. What follows this is what can only be described as a passage which can be heard on every Transatlantic release, and this annoys me unendingly. Whilst there is nothing wrong with influences, because every single band since the first Neanderthal picked up a bone and started hitting a tightened skin can be said to have been influenced by somebody, what sets something of interest apart is the new, and this is not new. It is merely derivative. It perhaps doesn’t help that my love affair with said band ended quite a few years ago. I do perk up a bit seven minutes in when we have some violin and trumpet harking us back to Spaghetti Western days of yore and the story which follows of love unrequited is enjoyable, and it has the virtue of being different. It lasts two and a half minutes before we have a standard, but decent, guitar solo and then normal service is resumed before the closing brass section reignites the interest, but this is a track ten minutes too long, I am afraid.
Rock Paper Scissors is far better. I am unaware of who contributes the strings, but this has a really good folk pastoral feel to it featuring some nice youthful voices alongside Keegan and Leonard. There is a similar feel to the title track with some more delicate orchestration, piano, and yearning mellotron. Overall, a pleasant track which is spoilt a wee bit by some extremely strange voices shouting “everybody” loudly which is totally out of keeping with the theme of all else.
Said The Stranger tries its best to be quirky but ends up sounding to these ears like any of the recent shorter pieces put out by Stolt on TFK albums, with the exception of some rockabilly guitar and those bloody annoying keys again. The same criticism, by the way, could be levelled at Here With You With Me. I had to check, and check again, whether Roine was lending his support to the album (he isn’t).
There are two bonus tracks available for this album, and it is these which provide me with the most pleasure. I’m Not Alright starts off as something Elvis Costello in his post New Wave period could easily have written with the chorus segments rather more traditional AOR, but not any less enjoyable for that. The closing segment with its lovely pastoral wind instrument is really pleasant. The final track is Just Another Day At The Beach which I suppose could be described as a modern, somewhat quirky, take on classic American West Coast pop classics, as exemplified in the day by The Beach Boys. It is unashamedly commercial, but I really like it.
I have no doubt that this album will do very well for both the band and Inside Out, to whom they are signed, but I am afraid the bulk of it is not my cup of tea. I somehow doubt that there will be much incentive to return to it now the words have been put down onto computer and website. However, if you love spending your days listening to Spock’s Beard, Transatlantic, and TFK and don’t mind others doing it, then you will be all over this. Personally, I would have liked far more of the closing couple of tracks and, in terms of originality and “doing their own thing”, Troika by DMJ comes out well on top.