TIGHTLY UNWOUND

Tightly Unwound is a very modern sounding Prog album in the tradition of Porcupine Tree and even more so, Radiohead. In fact vocalist Bruce Soord would surely love to be Thom Yorke, so much does he sound like him. While it's far from the most exciting thing I've heard this year, it's a pretty good album though comes across as a little contrived.

My Debt to You opens the album and it's a smart move. This acoustic guitar driven melodic song paves the way nicely for the powerful opening of Shoot First before it sinks firmly into something that could have appeared on a Radiohead album around the time of The Bends. Still I quite enjoyed it and it has a particularly strong and memorable chorus.

After the intro Sinners drops down to more acoustic guitar with a slight flamenco feel to it, more like Porcupine Tree in execution with a powerful wall of sound style chorus with some pleasing atmospheric guitar towards the end. One of the better tracks for me.

Not quite the title track, Tightly Wound, we've lost the Un of Unwound is under laid with a solid 7/8 drum pattern with ambient sounding instrumentation much of the time until those acoustic guitars appear again and Soord's best Thom Yorke impression so far and a string driven (on keyboards) finale.

The Sorry State is another track with much use being made of acoustic guitar, sympathetic well constructed drumming from Keith Harrison which leads into another favourite of mine, My Bleeding Hand. I enjoyed the drive of this track, like Tightly Wound played in sevens much of the time. The clanging snare sound works well on the verse of this powerful track as does the guitar solo.

As is the case with all Progheads I enjoy to hear a band stretch out on the longer tracks. We get 2 of them here near the end of the album separated by the less than memorable And So Say All Of You. Sadly they prove to be a little disappointing and do nothing that couldn't have been accomplished in half the time. Different World is the better of the two having a decent melody and some good drumming from Harrison but there's not enough of interest to keep the attention for almost 11 minutes. The same criticism can be made of album closer Too Much To Lose which at 15 minutes is even longer. For the first four minutes it drags along rather tediously before an instrumental section picks up the pace a bit and just when you think it's all over the drums bring it back into a more ambient style with a spoken word vocal. Again a nice drum groove from Harrison - yes I like his style and it turns out to be the best part of the track. Sadly the final section goes nowhere of interest and I'd have been quite happy if they'd stopped at the 11 minute mark.

Overall then a decent if less than spectacular album but a shame a bit more couldn't have been made of the 2 longer tracks and a little less Radiohead wouldn't go amiss.