Space cowboys, sure. Space opera? No. The band’s first album isn’t a tortuously complex concept album but rather a collection of country pop/rock songs that invite comparison to The Byrds, Eagles and other folk/rock artists of the day. While it doesn’t constitute progressive rock, there are moments when Space Opera pushes their music into interstellar overdrive: “Guitar Suite,” “Over And Over,” “Holy River.” Listeners have heard in these agitated exceptions traces of Frank Zappa, Robert Fripp and other icons of the progressive renaissance. However, this facet of the band (which seemed to stem from Scott Fraser) isn’t the main attraction. It’s only one ingredient, an unexpected one, that deserves a backseat behind the would-be hits: “Country Max” (with its shades of “Freebird”) and “My Telephone Artist.” These make the strongest case for Space Opera as a sustainable band, one that might have flourished in the cowboy rock climate of the mid Seventies. Like the Eagles, they were fortunate to have several songwriters with different musical personalities: Fraser’s arty experiments, Bullock’s concise cowboy rock and the softer folk rock of Philip White. Honestly, as a progressive rock fan, I’m most interested in Space Opera when they’re most experimental, but as a music fan I have to admit that the whole album goes down easy. But first, you’ll need to put any notions of space operas right out of your head, since this music inhabits an entirely different universe than Hawkwind. Instead, it belongs to a world where folk and rock and psychedelia intertwine, the great plain of the space cowboy.