THE FALSE HOLLOW PHANTOMS OF BEAUTY

The fifth Mutiny in Jonestown album completely consists of songs based on the stories and poetry of HP Lovecraft. The cover is a painting representing Lovecraft as an 18th century English writer ' which he often thought of himself as - though his reality of living in Providence around the turn of the 20th century was of course much different, but back to the music. I feel this is the album where the band finally realized their full potential as a prog band creating a unique sound and style that would, for the most part, be the basis of the rest of their albums. This style consists of somewhat restrained or low key vocals often doubled or in 2 part harmony, keyboards providing washes and atmospheres to set the background ' with an occasional lead synth solo, drums that accentuate and follow the inventive and melodic bass lines rather than most rhythm sections where the bass follows the drums, and guitars that are the frequent stars of the show with distorted rhythms, swirling backgrounds and leads taking most of the solos, some traditional and some with slide or much later pedal steel guitar. Lyrics are also highly important in their task of transforming frequently long and highly descriptive stories or concepts into a song lyric format while still telling the story. While these attributes evolved over time, they really became the foundation that most future Mutiny in Jonestown albums are built on.

First up is, 'Nathicana' with the lyrics coming from the Lovecraft poem of the same name. The band creates a swirling guitar wash over a strong rhythm section as a platform for the words. The poem is naturally separated into 2 halves, the first beautiful and wholesome, the second demonic (or as Lovecraft would have spelled it, "daemonic"), and the music attempts to portray this, ending with a nice guitar solo.

Next is the nearly 10 minute 'Mnar Dissolving' with lyrics telling the Lovecraft story, 'The Doom that Came to Sarnath'. The piece moves through many vocal and instrumental sections ending with a synth and guitar duel.

The shortest song is next, 'The Strange High House in the Mist' and features a nice bass guitar and lead synth duet in the middle leading to the final vocal section.

The final song is the highlight of the album, a 25 minute musical adaptation of Lovecraft's short story, 'The Festival'. The song is broken up into 3 sections, 'Arrival', 'Procession' and 'Escape' which mirror the main parts of the story. There are plenty of vocal sections telling the story separated by instrumental interludes and guitar and or synthesizer solos over backing progressions often in odd time signatures. In addition, many sections emphasize the dynamic changes of a very quiet section next to a loud one. The song ends with a dark musical accompaniment to Lovecraft's final words which end the story as follows:

'For it is of old rumours that the soul of the devil-bought haste not (from his charnal clay) but fats and instructs the very worm that gnaws. 'Till out of corruption horrid life springs and the dull scavengers of earth wax crafty to vex it and monstrous to plague it. Great holes secretly are digged where earth's pores ought to suffice and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl.'

Setting that to music is a big ask, but the band does it nicely. Interesting to note of the ending is a clear influence from Fish of Marillion. The vocals repeat the final line, ''that ought to crawl' three times which is of course reminiscent of how Fish used to repeat a short phrase multiple times for emphasis, especially on live recordings.

While you don't have to be a Lovecraft fan to enjoy this album, it would make the lyrical interpretation a little deeper (just like you don't have to have read Stephen King to enjoy the movie adaptation of 'Carrie', but it does fill in some of the backstory). That said, the lyrics still do a good enough job to get enough of the stories across so the songs can stand on their own. Musically, this is clearly the most cohesive album the band has done yet and is firmly placed in the prog realm. Whether this is neo-prog, space-prog or some other subgenre is debatable, but what is a fact is that this is the best most complete prog offering the band has given us yet and for that I rank it as 4 stars.