14

This is the bands 24th studio album and is a mix of old Mutiny in Jonestown songs updated and rearranged for 2014 along with a handful of cover tunes. The title was chosen because there are 14 songs and the album was released on 4/14/14. Spooky huh? Anyway, the reworked Mutiny in Jonestown songs were chosen for this project because, for one reason or another, I wasn't happy with the original recording quality and felt they deserved better. These came out very well, which is not an easy thing to pull off. I've found over the years that re-recording one of my own songs is usually unsuccessful for the simple reason that the original will always sound, "right" and the new version can't duplicate the happy accidents that make the first version special. In the case of the album "14", many of the bands old songs sound much better than the original versions. This is especially true of remakes from the bands first two live albums ("In the Walls of Eryx" from 1987 and "Random Animal Parts from 1988). Those songs, "1000 Below", "Sick of" and "In the Walls of Eryx" always suffered from being very good songs recorded in a very bad way with a couple cheap microphones placed in the room where the performance occurred. Since I don't have Steven Wilson's phone number to remaster the live albums, completely rerecording these songs is the best option. These remakes give them new life, as you can hear from giving a listen to "1000 Below" available as the last song on the "Anthology III (2003 ? 2014)".

Some of the other cover songs stay true to their original feel, ("Sur La Trace Des Fees" and "La Route Aux Cypres" by Ange and "Moonglum" by Hawkwind). Others are completely reworked which usually means sped up and given an energetic bass and drums rhythm section not heard on the original (King Crimsons', "I Talk to the Wind", Nine Inch Nails, "Right Where it Belongs" and the Grateful Deads', "Rosemary").

Deciding on a rating for this album is difficult. On the one hand, it's a very good album with creative takes on reworking these covers into something completely new, and very good upgrades of songs true to their original sound and feel. On the other hand, because it's a covers album and I don't own the copyrights or permissions to post half the songs it will never be available on BandCamp or heard by anyone but a small circle of friends. Maybe someday the copyright laws will change regarding cover tunes and at that time I'll definitely be posting this album to BandCamp for all to hear. Regardless of the availability issue, I'm going to treat this as I would any other very good prog album that's unfortunately out of print and unavailable and give this one 3 stars.