DAY FOR NIGHT

The style and sound of this album is very similar than its precedent, the excellent The Kindness of Strangers... But Day for Night is definitively more pop oriented. Most of the songs are short, and really really commercial. I think the band was trying to be on the radio waves more frequently. Ok, it hasn't to be a bad thing... The problem is that half of the song of this album are just forgettable. Skin, Gibberish, The Distance to the Sun (a bad copy of their previous June...), Can't Get it Wrong... Too many mediocre moments.

Honestly, most of the best Spock's Beard songs are the longer ones... In their epics they have always given their best. And here, the longer song last less than ten minutes. Maybe the final part of the album could be considered as only one song, like some kind of epic... Tracks 8 to 13, I mean, because some of these songs are musically related, and they could have been put together, making another Beard's long epic. Anyway, the irregular quality of this final part of the album makes the separation between tracks maybe better...

Nevertheless, I think every Spock's Beard fan will enjoy this album... Because this is 100% Neal Morse's Spock's Beard. Not so good like other albums... But with great moments anyway. I specially like how well the Neal's voice sounds here, and the strong Dave Meros's bass, as always. Being this album more poppy, the keyboards have a bit less protagonism as their previous efforths... But on the contrary, we can enjoy a fine Alan Morse's work on guitars, sounding really inspired in tracks like Crack the Big Sky and The Gypsy.

Best songs: Day for Night (one of the best short tracks Spock's Beard has ever made...), Crack the Big Sky (my personal favourite of the album... I really enjoy the sax here, and the whole instrumental section), Lay it Down (beautiful little acoustic track...) and The Healing Colours of Sound (good vocal melodies)... The Gipsy and My Shoes are not bad. The rest ist not really special.

Conclusion: another very good Spock's Beard release... But a bit under the rest of the album they made with Neal Morse as frontman. Maybe too commercial, too poppy and with anything really new. But it has enough enjoyable moments to make worthy the purchasing of this album, specially if you are a Beard's fan. If you are not, there are better works to start with in my opinion... But if you don't like the long tracks, maybe you will find this album their best! I'm proud to having it in my collection anyway.

My rating: ***1/2

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