Last year, I reviewed the second album in The John Irvine Band “The End of Days” trilogy of concept albums, The Starships Are Gathering, and you can read my review of that fine work by clicking on the button below.

Come January 2025, and we have the final work of the trilogy, Here Come the Robots!, and alongside Irvine we again have the very talented Andrew Scott on drums. There are six brand new pieces of music which very neatly finish off this jazz-rock concept, and, incidentally, the album is dedicated to the late, great, Vangelis Papathanassiou, and I will say straight away that Irvine’s music bears comparison to the maestro. Last week, we watched Blade Runner, and I was immediately put in mind of this album. It is available on Bandcamp at https://thejohnirvineband.bandcamp.com/album/here-come-the-robots Incidentally, John appeared on my colleague, Graham Harfleet’s The Progressive Rock Show on 2nd February, and provided Graham with a fascinating insight into his craft and the album, with every track played. You can listen to this fine show by clicking on https://progzilla.com/the-progressive-rock-show-broadcast-sunday-2nd-february-2025/

We open with A Dream of Utopia, an epic track, so once again no shortage of ambition and scope on the part of the composer. I played this on my Progzilla Radio show the other Saturday, and you can get a sneak preview of this by clicking on the podcast at https://progzilla.com/lazland-on-progzilla-radio-episode-15/

The story behind this is of an epic poem, that of the song title, which saw the robots coming to humanity’s aid by building the infrastructure we were no longer able to build owing to the rising temperatures on the planet, the robots working to provide some form of normality thus countering the self-imposed foolishness of humanity. Immediately, the hope of a bright future and, in tandem, the influence of Vangelis is felt in the bright keys and effects, underpinned by solid drumming, but also notice those gorgeous guitar licks and grooves created, the combination creating a jazz sonic delight.

The Coexistence of Opposites is precisely that, the dream of man and machine working together to put things right. The opening segment is effects driven, again providing an optimistic tone, the keys bright in anticipation of the new dawn, and it is rather cinematic, the listener imagining he is standing staring at the night sky in both wonder and hope. Just short of halfway in, the song expands into a breezy electro rock number. I like the interplay between the keys and the guitars, and the rhythm section pushes matters along very nicely.

The title track is next, and is the shortest standalone piece on the album, and its title is self-descriptive. The machines have arrived, a lot of them, raining down from the sky and setting to work immediately in the broken streets. This is a suitably industrious track, which is embedded below. Particularly impressive is Scott providing that underpinning activity supporting the excitement and work, and there is a great guitar riff as well.

The album closes with the three-part (appropriately) The End of Days Suite, nigh on twenty-four minutes of music.

Part One is The City Lights at Twilight, the author sitting in his high-rise apartment watching the industriousness of the machines, knowing that everything was going to be all right. The reconstruction is now in full flow, and the pretty sequence a minute in has you nodding your head in time to the relentless beat of the robots marching up and down, hammering, working, unencumbered by emotion or tiredness, and the mesmerising impact is put across extremely cleverly by Irvine, who provides us with the most beautiful, dreamy guitar burst.

Part Two is Building the Geodesic Dome, the robots creating a hemispherical thin-shell structure based on a geodesic polyhedron, the purpose to shield those inside from the raging heat outside. Some people were beginning to think they were being deliberately caged in, but the author disagreed, retaining his optimism at the services provided by the machines. The drum sets the scene of the triangle structure being built one by one, the keys providing for an understated core strength of the dome, but with some dystopian noises, especially on the guitars, now being heard, reflecting the doubts of those watching.

We close with An Aerial Cage, twelve minutes of pure proggy delight. The robots have turned on the grid and ordered everyone outside. The people thought that they were now free, full of joy, until the earth shook, the lights went out, and they were all shot upwards to the sky, on a final journey in space to oblivion, and the last thing he heard was the robots laughing in the city below. The piece opens with some crunching riffs, and the entire mood of the album changes into a dystopian nightmare, humanity’s worst fate revealed. This is a hard prog rock track, deeply complex at times. Five minutes in, the music turns eerily quieter, and you can hear the robots’ inner minds calculating, scheming, setting the scene for their final act, the guitar as dextrous as you will hear all year, the keys swirling nightmarishly, and the intensity builds inexorably to the final act of machine betrayal, loud and very good, the final notes those of the machines gloating in their triumph. It is a certainty that this suite will be a serious contender for this website’s “Topographic Oceans Award” for 2025, this celebrating those uber-epics in excess of twenty minutes.

I’ll say one thing. This story will not have you jumping for joy at the news of the latest advances in AI, trumpeted now by a captive media on a daily basis, and, indeed, there is a fine irony in this conclusion that humanity’s fate was visited on it entirely by its own actions, first in the devastation of war and climate change, and then in the supposed “cure”.

Here Come the Robots! is a fine album, sounds great, and is sumptuous in its musicianship. Very highly recommended.