OCTANE

The first Spock's Beard album after Neal Morse left, Feel Euphoria, found the band still largely pursuing the prog purist approach which got them noticed on their debut album (The Light) and which had made rich returns on V and Snow. Sure, the precise balance of their blend of modern rock production and execution and classic prog callbacks inevitably shifted without Neal involved, but it was still broadly the same sort of deal, as you might expect for an album whose main mission was to convince everyone that Spock's Beard without Neal was a viable possibility to begin with.

Then came along Octane, and there's a significant shift in their sound here - the band perhaps feeling that having steadied the ship with Feel Euphoria, they could afford to attempt a more comprehensive shift of direction. It's not that the influence of classic prog is gone - far from it, opening number The Ballet of the Impact is awash with Genesis-esque touches, I Wouldn't Let It Go is mostly an acoustic rock number but has these production flourishes reminiscent on those on the straight-ahead acoustic rock pieces Pink Floyd would include on albums like Meddle, and Surfing Down the Avalanche even includes some blink-and-you'll-miss-'em Gentle Giant-esque instrumental breaks amid what is mostly a much more modern-sounding piece.

And that's the key phrase here: "more modern". Past Spock's Beard albums had a strong whiff of retro-prog to them; this was always mixed in with just enough modern touches and influences from outside of prog that they weren't solely and exclusively pandering to the crowd who just want to hear classic prog endlessly rehashed, but there was enough of a homage to yesteryear going on that the audience who did want the nostalgia trip had plenty to chew on.

Here, though, Spock's Beard are less about progressive rock in the sense of "taking inspiration from the prog greats of the 1970s" (though there's still a touch of that) and more in the sense of "applying progressive rock sensibilities to their songwriting, even when making music in an essentially modern mould". On a casual listen, segments of Octane can very much sound like modern-day middle-of-the-road rock - but dig deeper, listen a little longer, and you'll find that even at its AOR-est this is AOR for the thinking listener, and there's prog sensibilities underpinning what they are doing here even if they aren't going out of their way to explicitly signal that.

If you were very, very invested in the Spock's Beard sound as it previously existed, I can see how this might feel like a shift - but like I said, there'd always been a touch of the modern as well as the classic in Spock's Beard's arsenal, and the experiment of focusing on the modern this album feels like it really pays off, especially when if you listen patiently there'll be plenty of prog-oriented moments here and there. The first half hour or so of the album, after all, is a single song-suite - and wasn't Neal always penning long-ish mini-rock operas for the band during his tenure? This really isn't as much of a break from precedent as it might sound - the major shift is that they're leaning less on classic prog sounds in general, and much less on Gentle Giant in particular.