This is the third in a six-part series on the early releases of Spock's Beard. In this installment, we'll take a closer look at the band's 1998 debut album, The Kindness of Strangers.
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Many years ago, when I had barely been playing Chapman Stick for a matter of months, a jazz pianist friend of mine (whom we shall refer to as “Breakfast”) was kind enough to invite me out to play in a pizza joint on the square with Paul Slavens. I just barely stumbled through the gig. I am not sure what I played, and in retrospect I am sure there were some embarrassing moments, but I made it, nonetheless. I distinctively remember playing a song called Denton Escape Velocity, which described a fascinating phenomenon: it is possible to leave Denton, but you have to be going REALLY fast. Otherwise, you just get sucked back into orbit. As are many of Slavens’ best songs, it was satirical, funny, and inarguably true. Many people who leave Denton seem to come back.
I moved to Denton in 1989 to go to UNT, and I stayed in the city’s orbit for nearly twenty years. When my wife and I finally left the metroplex in 2008, I thought for sure that I had reached Denton Escape Velocity and that my path would lead me away from my second home. I was wrong.
There have been several issues with our life in Austin that have become impossible to ignore. I have been increasingly dissatisfied with aspects of my position. The rising cost of living in the city has made it impossible to subsist on our teacher’s salaries. We have not found a sustainable plan for getting P into kindergarten that doesn’t turn her into a latchkey kid at age 5. These and other nagging problems made the idea of a change more and more appealing. My wife and I began putting out some feelers in Austin, Houston, and the northern DFW metroplex to see if we could land something that would resolve some of these problems. Being an elementary art teacher, she got the first real bite.
And don’t you know where it was?
Denton.
She was offered a position at a brand new elementary school in a reputable district, and we decided that she should accept. Not only would she take the lead at a new school, but she felt so confident in the school’s philosophy that we both felt comfortable about P attending with her. Additionally, P and EJ could grow up in Denton, which is more like the Austin of my youth than the ridiculously overcrowded, overpriced, self-important, bloated mess that the city has sadly become. I would much rather let my kids make fond memories of dancing the polka to Brave Combo at Denton’s Christmas Tree Lighting on the Square than inhaling car fumes at the Trail of Lights.
Seems oddly fitting, then, that after almost two decades, one of my favorite bands from Denton’s big live music boom of the 90s has released a new album this year. Back when I played with Fletcher, we had a few projects that we openly supported whenever we could, and one of them was Bobgoblin. They had all the accessible punk-pop aesthetic of Green Day, but tempered it firmly with the virtuosity, intensity, and intellect of Rush. Plus, they wore uniforms.
They were a great live act whose musicianship far exceeded any superficial preconceptions surrounding the punky style in which they played. I particularly remember finding it difficult to take my attention away from drummer Rob Avsharian. His playing was always a presence, and often a subtle one. He was Bobgoblin’s spark plug, not unlike Terry Bozzio was when he played with the Missing Persons in the 80s. Avsharian could energize a relatively straightforward rhythm simply by aggressively nailing it deep in the pocket, but he could also throw out highly technical and melodic passages when it served the song.
Bobgoblin had a major release in 1997 called the 12-Point Master Plan that deserves its own dedicated post at some point, but for now let’s suffice it to say that it was and still is personal favorite. Since then, the band has been active at varying levels and in different forms, but no plans for a new full-length Bobgoblin release have ever been announced - until recently.
Several months ago, plans for the release of Love Lost for Blood Lust, the first full Bobgoblin album in nearly twenty years, began to surface. Early recordings were posted and taken down. Partial digital releases were teased on Amazon and other major outlets. Finally, earlier this year, the album was released in full form on disc. I ordered it directly from the Bobgoblin site and amazingly, it picks up right where the band left off. The consistency between it and its predecessor belies the decades-long gap that exists between them – a continuity that stands in tribute to Bobgoblin’s unwavering mission statement.
It is important to note, however, that Love Lost for Blood Lust is not a rework of the 12-Point Master Plan. It is a more mature album, but as with most things Bobgoblin, its maturity is only subtly revealed. Superficially, they still present themselves a purveyors of angular, riff-driven, intensely delivered power pop with a countercultural edge. Inside these infectious tunes, however, hide dense production, complex rhythms, and an almost sarcastic mastery of the power chord’s harmonic ambiguity. None of these features are new to Bobgoblin, of course, but they are expressed on this album in way that suggests decades worth of consideration, rather than a spontaneous rehash.
Love Lost for Blood Lust has the sense that it is a labor of love made for long time fans of the band, with the optimistic undercurrent of raising visibility in the process. It is certainly being released to a much different world than its predecessor. Gone are the days of beating the streets to get a record deal and getting gypped by the company. For better or for worse, artists today have much more creative control over their work and often have a direct line toward their audience. I for one am very grateful to have the opportunity to dip my toe in 90s nostalgia without living in the past as I end one era of my life and usher in another.
When I stumbled across Transatlantic in the late 90s through my sputtering dial-up internet, I had already been a longstanding fan of Marillion and had developed a healthy respect for Dream Theater. I was completely unaware, however, that other progressive rock bands existed. My eyes opened, and suddenly The Flower Kings and Spock’s Beard displaced my power pop agenda, rekindling an interest in the style that I so strongly identified with in my youth. This carried me for quite a while, but a huge rupture occurred when Neal Morse announced that he would be leaving Spock’s Beard to more ardently pursue his religious beliefs. While Spock’s Beard sauntered on, it seemed that without Morse, Transatlantic would cease to exist.
I was quite surprised, then, when a couple of years ago, Transatlantic announced their reformation. They concomitantly released The Whirlwind, their finest work to date and an album that which solidified their identity as a self-sufficient band, distinct from the member’s home groups. It would have been a fitting final act for this “supergroup” to end on. If anything, however, Transatlantic seems to be gaining more momentum. Early this year, they released Kaleidoscope, their fourth studio album. Kaleidoscope isn’t as immediately impressive as The Whirlwind, but it is still an incredible statement that displays Transatlantic’s evolution into true masters of the symphonic style, at least as it appeared at the end of the 90s.
Initially, Kaleidoscope seemed to be a throwback to Transatlantic’s early releases. Morse’s characteristic compositional style provided the framework upon which the other members realize their own contributions. Certainly, the album’s overall structure, with two multi-movement epics and a few shorter form songs, has more in common with their first two albums than the hour-long song cycle that makes up The Whirlwind. Like its predecessor, though, Transatlantic’s lyrics have a noticeably heartfelt conviction (not reflected in their lip-synching abilities) that was not always present in Morse’s earlier work.
Despite Morse’s influence on the album’s large-scale construction, however, Kaleidoscope is a step forward for the entire group in terms of their unified chemistry. Gone are the days where Transatlantic ground its gears between the stylistic preferences of its discrete members. The album definitively consolidates Transatlantic as a unique, distinctive band, with members displaying an intuitive understanding of each other’s compositional and technical strengths. Like a lot of the best progressive rock, Kaleidoscope takes some patience. There is a lot of material on the album, and it really has to be “learned” for its vast harmonic and melodic nuance to have full impact.
Kaleidoscope’s prominence in my current listening just happens to coincide with an increased interest in progressive rock in general due to the release of Yes’ new album Heaven and Earth. While my opinions on the album are best relegated to their own post, it is safe to say that the progressive community is sharply divided on the album, due in no small part to Jon Anderson’s absence as lead vocalist. This topic has been a hot one for several years now, and I would imagine hung like an awkward cloud on the Progressive Nation at Sea, last year’s at-sea progressive rock festival. For all the attention that Yes has been enjoying, thanks to Transatlantic, Anderson was afforded his own chance to shine at this event.
The Revealing Science of God is the side-long opening track from Tales from Topographic Oceans, an album that is notorious in Yes' catalog for its conceptual density. The current iteration of Yes is forging their own path, and it is unlikely
that this composition will find its way onto their set list in the near
future. With Transatlantic as his backing band, however, Jon Anderson performs as good of a rendition of this piece as one could wish for.
Particularly with limited rehearsal time, performing a song as complex as this one requires more than just cohesion - it takes a cooperative awareness cultivated in mutual respect and trust. With the synergy that they exhibit both here and on Kaleidoscope, however, I see virtually no limit to their mastery. They could conceivably function as the “house band” of multi-band progressive festivals, backing any number of walk-on musical legends with deferential, high-energy performances of classic progressive material.
Jason Falkner’s solo debut solidified him as a power pop icon in my book, and his relatively marginal status turned me into a staunch advocate of his work. It’s worth mentioning here that Falkner was also a contributing member of The Grays, and it was around this point in the timeline that I obtained my first copy of their singular release Ro Sham Bo. Creating a family tree based on the comings and goings of this power pop supergroup would also have some interesting results, but it would prohibitively widen the scope of this particular project. I have already dedicated a post to Ro Sham Bo that I am still quite fond of, but I think it would be irresponsible not to directly mention The Grays in any discussion related to Jellyfish and Jason Falkner. .
Jason Falkner released his second solo album Can You Still Feel? in 1999. The album boasted a step forward in terms of production, undoubtedly due to the presence of Nigel Godrich. His production made the entire experience far more textured than its predecessor, perhaps overly so. I think that the effort to polish these tracks buffed out some of the grit that made Presents Author Unknown so engaging. In any case, Can You Still Feel? still retained the vast array of musical nuance that is Falkner’s stylistic trademark. At times, the wider production expands his work to nearly symphonic proportions.
As was the unfortunate trend among Jellyfish-related projects, Can You Still Feel? did not get much push from the record company. Like many artists in the late 90s, Falkner lost his recording contract due to weak sales which, like many artists, were the result of poor record label promotion - the most common and infuriating catch-22 from that era! Probably discouraged (speculation, of course), he faded a bit into the background as a solo artist. The astute, however, could catch his name popping up on various projects as a producer and performer. Despite taking a step back from the spotlight, he did have a short-form solo release in 2004 in the form of the Bliss Descending EP.
At that point, I don’t think that Falkner was trying too hard to break into a larger audience. Bliss Descending was quietly released to those that were paying attention. Where Can You Still Feel? was Falkner’s most overt attempt at a big studio record, Bliss Descending was quite its opposite. The songs were not lacking in their usual level of detail, but Falkner’s performances were more casual than they had been, and the production was somewhat informal. This laid-back, relaxed approach opened up an introspective side of Falkner that actually served Bliss Descending rather well.
The woes and disappointments of being an immensely talented and hardworking musician during the late 90s and early 00's were undoubtedly very frustrating for Falkner. This was a transitory time in popular music, when record company dominance was slowly giving way to the more recent independent artist models that we see today. For Falkner, the future probably seemed very unclear, if not bleak. He would not release another full-length album for awhile, and his strategy for keeping himself afloat in this chaotic period would make it even longer for that record to become readily available in the States. I tried to stay aware of Falkner's career, but there was activity amongst other branches in the Jellyfish family tree that would garner my attention.
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It’s not rocket science to see that I am an advocate of progressive rock. Caught up in the mediated narrative of MTV during my formative teenage years, though, caused my exposure to progressive rock to be relatively limited. I was only aware of the most visible artists. In the late 90s, however, the internet’s increasing resources opened up a whole new prog world, with an endless supply of obscure bands that I had never heard, both old and new. One such band was Gentle Giant, a 70s group that never reached the level of visibility and influence of Yes and Genesis, but were unequalled in terms of overall virtuosity and musicianship.
I recently noticed that my Gentle Giant collection was unjustly dusty, so I put their 1972 release Octopus in rotation. Listening to it now, I find that I remembered (and liked) it better than I thought.
Most fans cite Octopus as the beginning of Gentle Giant’s “classic” period. The album doesn’t mark a major shift in the band’s sound from their previous work, but in comparison Octopus has a noticeable focus. Some distinctive stylistic features emerged on the album that would come to characterize the band for the next few years. Most impressive of these emergent characteristics was their impressive use of vocal polyphony.
Yes always considered themselves to be a vocal group, but they never did anything that could touch Knots - at least not live. Gentle Giant continued to refine the technique, however, and, along with being multi-instrumental, it became one of their things.
When I first got into Gentle Giant, their music seemed like gibberish. It took quite a bit of focused listening to disentangle all of their ideas into an intelligible structure. There is, however, a passion and beauty to their work that is borne of a devoted conviction to musical experimentation. I think if I ever had to write a school song, I would steal some of the melodic material from the beautiful Think of Me With Kindness.
Up until this point, I operated under the assumption that good music should be shared, but Gentle Giant presented the the possibility that some music, no matter how good, might be best held close to the chest. When I was listening to them I was not surrounded by musicians as I had been during my college years. I was ridiculed a bit by the people around me who didn’t get what I saw in the band. I admit that from a certain perspective Gentle Giant represents a kind of indulgent inaccessibility that Spinal Tap was poking fun at. I strongly felt, however, that their musicianship warranted respect at the very least. They certainly deserved better than to carry the label "that crap you listen to." As a result, my memories of the band are cloistered – huddled up in private listenings in a short-ceilinged upstairs loft where I lived in Krum.
But, times have changed. I am in a better place overall these days, and I intentionally expend less energy trying to win the approval of others. Additionally, the anonymity granted by the internet allows me to shamelessly plug this obscure and inspiring band without too much fear of peer ridicule. The people who like them will, and the people that don't won't. Regardless, I feel like I am getting even more out of Octopus now than I did then, so if you are curious about Gentle Giant I think it would be an excellent starting point.
Jason Falkner’s solo debut solidified him as a power pop icon in my book, and his relatively marginal status turned me into a staunch advocate of his work. It’s worth mentioning here that Falkner was also a contributing member of The Grays, and it was around this point in the timeline that I obtained my first copy of their singular release Ro Sham Bo. Creating a family tree based on the comings and goings of this power pop supergroup would also have some interesting results, but it would prohibitively widen the scope of this particular project. I have already dedicated a post to Ro Sham Bo that I am still quite fond of, but I think it would be irresponsible not to directly mention The Grays in any discussion related to Jellyfish and Jason Falkner. .
Jason Falkner released his second solo album Can You Still Feel? in 1999. The album boasted a step forward in terms of production, undoubtedly due to the presence of Nigel Godrich. His production made the entire experience far more textured than its predecessor, perhaps overly so. I think that the effort to polish these tracks buffed out some of the grit that made Presents Author Unknown so engaging. In any case, Can You Still Feel? still retained the vast array of musical nuance that is Falkner’s stylistic trademark. At times, the wider production expands his work to nearly symphonic proportions. 
At that point, I don’t think that Falkner was trying too hard to break into a larger audience. Bliss Descending was quietly released to those that were paying attention. Where Can You Still Feel? was Falkner’s most overt attempt at a big studio record, Bliss Descending was quite its opposite. The songs were not lacking in their usual level of detail, but Falkner’s performances were more casual than they had been, and the production was somewhat informal. This laid-back, relaxed approach opened up an introspective side of Falkner that actually served Bliss Descending rather well. 
I recently noticed that my Gentle Giant collection was unjustly dusty, so I put their 1972 release Octopus in rotation. Listening to it now, I find that I remembered (and liked) it better than I thought.