MISSA ATROPOS

Gazpacho's latest album, 'Missa Atropos' is just incredible. Scratch beneath the surface on several listens and what appears reasonably simple belies an underlying complexity in song structure and musical arrangement. They showed great potential on their debut 'Bravo' , then after a few years they came of age with 'Night'. 'Tick Tock' cemented their maturity in the prog world and I didn't really think they could better that album.

But in the same way that Radiohead went one better after 'Bends' with 'OK Computer', Gazpacho have done the same with 'Missa Atropos'. This is their 'OK Computer' and their 'Dark Side of the Moon' in my opinion and tracks like Defense Mechanism, Splendid Isolation and the eponymous Missa Atropos ably demonstrate just how far Gazpacho have come in terms of shaking off the Marillion wannabe image and actually presenting this listener with the album that Marillion should have made in the last 10 years but have never quite managed to hit the spot.

Fabulous melodies, dreamlike vocals, underlying themes connected throughout an album that is greater than the sum of it's individual parts - wholly coherent and deserving of repeated listening! The album of 2010 for me!