THE LONG DIVISION

Pleasant enough album with a sort of Big Big Train/Spock's Beard vibe to it. George Dobbs does a decent enough job as the band's hyper-theatrical lead vocalist, which is a good thing since the album hinges on its thematic concept - namely, an examination of the political situation in the USA and the apparent inability of the liberal-leaning and conservative wings of American society to find common ground.

The band's essential position is set out in opening track You're Fooling Yourselves, and by the end of it you'll probably know whether or not you dig what they're trying to do musically with the album and where they want to take the concept: for my part, as a non-US listener the implicit assumption that both sides of the divide are equally right and equally wrong is something I just plain can't agree with (compared with politics in the rest of the world, extreme-right positions pop up in surprisingly prominent places an awful lot in US politics whilst extreme-left positions have more or less no representation on the national stage), which means that I find the general arguments expressed in the lyrics irritating enough that it's a distraction from the music, and I don't find the music quite engaging enough to overcome that. So, on balance I think it's worth a spin but you need to be aware that if you have little patience for noncommittal neutrality in American politics you may find it grating.