SIA

Solstice have never been inclined to hurry when it comes to putting out studio albums, emitting them in little fits and starts here and there rather than keeping up a steady, consistent pace. Having taken a seven year break from studio albums after Prophecy, in 2020 they returned with Sia, their first release on Giant Electric Pea.

It's perhaps appropriate that Solstice should have found a home there, given that the label was founded by their old Marquee-era mates in IQ, and with a followup (Light Up) following some three years later and not one but two live albums also emerging since they joined the GEP fold, there's some reason to hope that this is kicking off a late-career rebirth for Andy Glass's neo-prog unit.

Certainly, things are freshened up a bit here with a new lead vocalist in the form of Jess Holland, replacing the capable Emma Brown who'd been singing lead since the Circles album. Holland doesn't represent a radical departure from the approach Emma took, any more than Emma was all that radically different from Sandy Leigh - Solstice lead vocalists have always had performances which sat at the borderline between laid-back singing and New Agey chanting, with a lot of influence from Jon Anderson of Yes. That's just kind of what the songs are composed to support, and Holland takes to it quite adeptly. (If you really want to compare and contrast, Cheyenne 2020 is a bonus track of this line-up tackling a number originally sung by Sandy Leigh.)

Holland replacing Brown is the only line-up change - the instrumentalists are the same team who brought us Spirit and Prophecy. This is perhaps beneficial; in earlier phases Solstice had a bit of a churn of personnel (Andy Glass is the only person still with the band who played on their debut album, after all), but now that the instrumentalists have been working together for over a decade they've really had a chance to gel.

The material here sits in that special realm which Solstice have made their own - relaxing, laid-back, peaceful music which nonetheless has enough structural complexity and instrumental flair to give progheads something to chew on. That sort of combination of New Age calm and prog intricacy is hard to pull off; Yes touched on it in a few of their quieter moments, as did Mike Oldfield, but I think the only group I can think of who really managed to strike this sort of balance was Jade Warrior.

That isn't to say things are always soporific - appropriately enough given their titles, Shout and Stand Up both have their more rambunctious moments. Nonetheless, the emphasis here is very much on continuing and evolving the New Age/neo-prog mashup that Solstice are so good at, with an infusion of folk here and there to help the two sides blend. Jenny Newman's violin is key to this, whilst Andy Glass's delicate touch on acoustic guitar is of course also a key ingredient.

On the whole, this didn't blow me away like Prophecy did, but I do think it's a solid new chapter in Solstice's gradually continuing story.