SEEING YOURSELF AS YOU REALLY ARE

Third Quadrant were a neo-prog outfit from the UK's brief early 1980s prog boom who, if their debut album is anything to go by, owe more than a little debt to Pink Floyd. Indeed, guitarist Simeon Manners has David Gilmour's bluesy style down cold, and about this foundation the band construct a range of spacey numbers that represent perhaps a neo-prog take on space rock, just as Marillion and IQ came at the neo-prog idea from a more symphonic prog perspective by way of their Genesis and Camel influences.

The downfall of the album is in its production standards; although the sound quality isn't flat-out awful, it's clearly closer to a demo tape than a fully-realised release of the sort that a high-quality studio could turn out. It is rather a shame that Third Quadrant were working at a time when budget studio recording setups hadn't hit the level of quality they would in subsequent decades, because as it stands the quality of the material here is somewhat obscured by the production standards the band had available to them at the time. (Also, I think the vocals are a little weak, but perhaps that might be a fault of the recording quality or the mix as opposed to anything else.)

Apparently, the group members are still in contact with each other, at least as of 2004, and I kind of hope that they will give consideration to putting out a reunion album. Other groups like Comedy of Errors whose stories seemed done and dusted back in the 1980s have pulled off revivals lately and finally attained the level of attention from the prog world they have deserved, and Third Quadrant's sound is just different enough that it might be possible for them to do something similar. As it stands, the album is an interesting historical curio but is not, in and of itself, a lost classic.