SNOW

Double concept albums were ballsy enough moves in the days of vinyl, when you'd likely be looking at some 80-ish minutes of music. In the CD era - particularly the time in the 1990s and early 2000s when people were trying to fill the full CD simply because they had the freedom to do so and the apparent death of vinyl made it more viable to sprawl out - it was particularly risky.

Take Spock's Beard's Snow, the final album of the Neal Morse-led era of the band, which tells a story of some two hours long. It's basically a story of a voyage of self-discovery undertaken by an albino kid - think Powder meets The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, only without the "directed by a convicted child molester" angle of Powder or the "bizarre classically-influenced psychodrama imagery" aspect of Lamb.

This isn't the first extended narrative penned by Neal Morse - before Spock's Beard blew up he'd penned a couple of musicals - but it still represents a bit of a stylistic shift for Spock's Beard, who hadn't done a full-blown concept album before (though they'd done enough long pieces that one could see this as a further evolution of that).

The distinction is that, because Neal puts such a high priority on the listener being able to follow the narrative, it tends to get into this structure of musically straightforward narrative section leading into complex instrumental section leading back into more straight-ahead narrative and so on and so forth until the album is done. This will inevitably bug some listeners - if you're just here to listen to the Beard progging out and don't particularly care about the story the album's going to feel a bit stop-start.

Inevitably, people's feelings about the album end up a bit entangled with their feelings about Neal Morse himself, since this is infamously the album he did before he left the band and, as with Peter Gabriel's departure from The Genesis post-Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, there's some truth to the belief that the album has Morse working through his conflicted feelings before his departure. It's tempting to read a Christian interpretation into things in light of Neal's subsequent career, though I don't mind that because it's very much in the mode of "this is me working through my feelings and exploring a thing I had to explore to be true to myself", which is a much more appealing way to discuss one's personal spiritual development than preachily berating others into coming to Jesus.

Still, it isn't so overtly Christian that you can't put other interpretations on it if you want, and there's enough meat to the musical backing to broadly please prog listeners. Spock's Beard seem to be a little more serious-minded this time - one can compare this to a similar shift that The Flower Kings made on The Rainmaker, in that in both cases you're dealing with bands more associated with sunny, exuberant prog shifting gear a little towards something a bit more focused and a little more subdued than usual (though Morse is a big one for his huge emotional crescendos and you get a fair few of them here). Open Wide the Flood Gates even includes a long jazzy section which goes further into that sort of realm than I remember Spock's Beard exploring before.

On the whole, the narrative aspects of the album end up bringing in enough padding that I can't quite call this album one of Spock's Beard's best - I feel like I'd be happier with a version of the album which focused on the challenging musical sections and wasn't so keen on explaining the story to me - but I think it's a more than respectable way for the Neal Morse era of the band to come to a close. I'd rate it somewhere above Kindness of Strangers and below Day For Night or Beware of Darkness.