THE LIGHT

Some days ago a guy from my Parish knocked the door to ask for used books, clothes and albums for the poor kids (I believe they use the clothes and sell the rest), so decided to help and give them like 100 original CD's that I don't listen or bought God knows why, albums that only use space I need in the house.

Among the CD's I took from the box were all the ones by SPOCK'S BEARD, a band that not being bad, has never caught my attention, but before giving them, decided to try again, so started with "The Light".

The album begins with the self titled song, a track that is an example of what I call light Prog, because despite pomp and brilliance of some sections it seems too derivative and mainstream oriented. Yes, the performance is good, but the music says nothing to me, specially the annoying vocals

"Go the Way on You" starts promising, with elaborate and contradictory passages, the soft melodic sound of the previous track are dissonant and interesting, with Dave Mero's playing a killed bass, but as soon as Morse enters, the song looses all this achievements to turn into some sort of dull Neo Prog (Not that Neo Prog is dull, there's a lot of exiting music in this genre, but there's also dull Neo as in this case), with Alan Morse trying without success to demonstrate his skills in the guitar and Neal playing a decent but average keyboard.

"The Water" is a long song (for me the term epic implies more than just length) and starts exiting with an excellent demonstration of Neal Morse's keys and Nick D'Virgilio drums, but soon is clear the song lacks of coherence, with a terrible guitar performance that simply destroys the good initial impression, as usual happens with SPOCK'S BEARD, I can't find head or feet and bores me to the point that I normally press the skip button.

If everything was boring and unimpressive up to this point, with "On the Edge" things got even worst, the vocals are specially annoying and the music turns from average to simply bad, hardly heard a song so bad from a band so well considerate by Progheads.

The album ends (at last) with "The Light (Home Demo)" and as I imagined, even less impressive than the final version except for the good acoustic guitar section.

Still haven't decided what to do with the album, probably the people from the Parish won't be able to get money for it, so if some friend wants to buy it from me, I'll sell it without remorse and give the money for charity.

Even when "The Light" is in my opinion one of the worst albums I ever heard, will go with 2 stars instead of 1, being that most of the band members are good musicians, and this is worth at least an extra star.