IT'S TEMPTING to pan Spock's Beard on spec alone: a quartet of wiggy Californian neo-proggies, whose magnum opus is a double disc conceptual odyssey, Snow, about an albino child that may be the messiah.
To be fair though, they aren't all that bad
, relatively speaking – that is, within the boundaries of their strange, cultish genre, one enjoyed almost exclusively by mulleted men in Dream Theatre T-shirts who look like they probably work as high school lab technicians by day.
Crucially, Spock's Beard do space-age soundscapes, symphonic key changes and seven-minute drum solos with a subtle nod and wink. Then again, a fortysomething man could hardly sport a sparkly silver sequin jacket and mirrored shades during a concert – as guitarist Neal Morse did here – without some sense of humour.
They aren't adverse to some bright pop ethics as well – Thoughts (Part 2) revolved smartly around a funky signature riff, while June – a kind of happy clappy pastoral ballad – had a certain rousing, evangelical quality to it, heightened further by Morse's adolescent son (or perhaps daughter – the shoulder length hair made it hard to tell) joining the band onstage to sing backing vocals.
Japanese keyboardist Ryo Okumoto's lengthy solo exploration – synthesised sci-fi noises meets pseudo-classical piano number Hereafter – scored big for sheer silly, overblown, laugh-out-loud-funny value. The unrelenting half-hour slew of operatic harmonies, noodling guitar passages and mystifying time signature shifts that followed it was increasingly wearying, but on some level still kind of fun.
I should stress again that I'm speaking relatively here.
The full article contains 270 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
