HEROIC MATERIALS

One of the best sounding, most disappointing artists to have graced my ears over the past decade, Robin Armstrong's Big Big Train-like historically-perspicacious songs and fine stable of collaborators have so much potential. Alas! for me this potential has remained obscured, trapped within its own self-immolating planetary core: potential, wholly unrealized, as there are no songs or albums that leave me wanting to come back for more. It's dull and insipid. As much as I look forward to hearing the lush landscapes of sound that Robin and Company create, I always come away unsatisfied--as if the drug has failed to assay my symptoms of discomfort; as if the balm has failed to assuage my itch. Album after album I purchased, then song by song, until I stopped buying and listening to Cosmograf music in the second half of the 2010s due to my fear of disappointment (and due to the dismal memory of all of the Cosmograf music I had deleted from my computer due to my utter boredom). It's not that I dislike Cosmograf music; it's more that I feel that my time is far more important than to be wasted on listening to mundane, unexceptional music--music that later makes me feel as if I've wasted valuable time, time that I wish I could have back. (A feeling that, I fear, increases with one's progression into one's "twilight years" and, thus, ay be unfamiliar to many of you younger folk.) Plus, I think I'm just tired of historical revisitation--of artists thinking that they're doing us all a favor by drawing attention to long "lost" heroes or time. Again: beautiful, lush soundscapes, attempting to express, in perfect seriousness, one man's respect and celebration of heroes (and times) past. Many will like the feeling of being washed in these sonic landscapes. I just happen to be not one of these.

C/three stars; a good contribution to Prog World from competent and sincere artists, but nothing more. Non fa per me.