FEEL EUPHORIA

If you're comparing Spock's Beard to Genesis, then Feel Euphoria is to A Trick of the Tail as Snow is to The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway. In both cases, you have a situation where the charismatic frontman of the group has left after the band has just completed an ambitious double album, and the drummer (in this case Nick D'Virgilio) has stepped into the gap.

Actually, in some ways Spock's Beard had it harder than Genesis. Sure, Peter Gabriel was important to Genesis - but he didn't exert such a heavy influence on the songwriting process as Neal Morse did in Spock's Beard before his departure. Genesis were fairly collaborative about how they did songwriting, whereas a large majority of Spock's Beard's material from The Light to Snow has Neal as the sole credited songwriter.

This means that for Feel Euphoria Spock's Beard had not one challenge but two: not only did they have to bed in a new vocalist, but they also had to adapt to a new songwriting and recording process - without Neal's steady hand at the tiller, but also with the new creative opportunities which naturally arise in such a situation.

The end result doesn't entirely sound like the earlier Beard, but it's not so far away either. The mixture of modern rock and classic prog influences is still there, but the proportions are subtly different, as are the selections of what exactly the band take from each of those worlds. Some of the more left-field influences - like musicals, gospel, and Latin music - that Neal would toss in from time to time are dialled back; other sounds which haven't been a major part of the Beard's fabric start to creep in. (There's an electronic edge to the opening sections of the starting track which feels particularly fresh to Spock's Beard.)

Is it a masterwork on the level of, say, V? No. But under the circumstances, I don't think you could reasonably expect Spock's Beard to produce one - the odds were always in favour of this being a transitional album which was hampered by the adjustment they needed to make.

At the same time, it's significantly better than I expected. I don't envy the Beard the position they were in, and I'm sure they must have had a long think about whether it would be better to take their time about putting out a followup in order to give themselves time to adjust to the shift in band chemistry and really work on honing some new material, or work quickly in order to maintain their momentum and send the message that they were here to stay. In the end, they had the confidence to take the latter approach, and Feel Euphoria is good enough that I think that gamble paid off.