V

After their debut album, The Light, Spock's Beard spent three albums or so exploring different ways to balance their prog roots with a more accessible approach, as well as tightening up their songwriting.

That period of workshopping then gave way to V, in which the band were confident enough to unabashedly steer in a prog-oriented direction (right down to kicking off with a 16 minute epic, At the End of the Day, and ending with a nearly half-hour one, The Great Nothing) whilst retaining a willingness to incorporate modern influences and a few ideas from outside the usual prog wheelhouse. (Check out the Latin guitar section in At the End of the Day before it shifts into an almost prog metal-ish mode, for instance, which then leads into a jazz fusion detour.)

As is often the case with Spock's Beard, there's an extent to which the lyrics can get repetitive on the longer tracks; on that front, on At the End of the Day Neal Morse's basic compositional trick seems to be to see how many different ways he can come up with to deliver the same basic lines. Still, it really works there, largely because the musical backing shifts and transforms enough that each time Neal Morse delivers the refrain of the song it carries a subtly different emotional weight. (He repeats the trick magnificently on The Great Nothing.)

It's not all longer tracks here either - in between the two epics there's a tasteful clutch of songs which manage to take all sorts of twists and turns in much tighter confines. (Revelation, for instance, shifts between "Beatles jamming with a jazz fusion group" and "Pink Floyd at their doomiest" in terms of its musical approach.)

Such a diversity of sound risks becoming chaotic, of course - they got away with that chaos on The Light largely on the strength of their earnest delivery, but they're a bit tighter about their songwriting here. The musical safe harbour they seem to return to the most could be described as "Kansas meets Gentle Giant" - Gentle Giant for the complexity and the diversity of sounds, Kansas for the dose of sunny heartland rock which adds a certain broad appeal to proceedings, and with the vocal harmonies providing a point of crossover between the two. Most of the time the approach leans more towards "Kansas with a big dose of Gentle Giant flavour" rather than the other way, though on Thoughts Part II the proportions fiip.

It's the Kansas in Spock's Beard which was my stumbling block for a while, though I've found myself warming on Kansas recently and so perhaps am in a better place to appreciate this album. (Listening to the preceding albums to better understand the musical journey which took them to this point is a help.)

Still, it would be simplistic to reduce their sound to this, especially since on V they seem to go out of their way to deepen their approach. Along with the soft guitar alt-rock and metal-ish heavier moments they've habitually been working in, there's a greater inclusion of this time of nods to jazz fusion, the band trusting the audience to follow them even when they start incorporating more challenging elements into their music.

If one were inclined to write them off as by-the-numbers retro-prog - as I admit I did in the past - they need only listen to Thoughts Part II, which despite its liberal borrowings from the past also sounds cutting edge and highly experimental. At the more accessible end, there's All On a Sunday, which sounds like a fusion of modern indie rock and Beatles-esque sunshine pop, Spock's Beard sounding warm and appealing and catchy but with just enough of a twist to reassure you that they're not just pandering to the charts with it.