Where Worlds Collide

Ian Jones came in for a lot of criticism when he revived the Karnataka name in 2005. The previous incarnation of the celtic-flavoured progressive rock band had imploded a year earlier just at the point where they seemed to be poised for a major breakthrough. The new-look Karnataka played some live dates in 2007 with just Ian Jones on bass remaining from the original band, which led some critics to dismiss them as a ‘glorified tribute band’, despite a fair proportion of new material in the setlist, including the memorable title track for their forthcoming album “The Gathering Light”.

In the end it would be another three years before that album would finally see the light of day, but when it finally emerged,  it’s exceeded all expectations.  The original band was great on atmospherics, but the new Karnataka have gone and done an album of the sort of hugely epic symphonic prog I haven’t heard done this well since Marillion’s “Brave”.  The sound is massive and multilayered with impassioned vocals and soaring guitars augmented by guest appearances from Hugh McDowell of ELO fame on cello, Troy Donockley’s distinctive Uilleann pipes, and a string quartet on a couple of songs.

Lisa Fury has always impressed me as a live singer, her studio vocal performances here have just the right balance between emotional depth and technical precision that distinguish a great singer from a merely good one. But for me the real revelation is Enrico Pinna’s guitar playing; prog guitar at it’s finest, with occasional echoes of Steve Hackett or Pendragon’s Nick Barratt, but a symphonic style that’s still his own.

The album starts with two instrumentals, the short but evocative “The Calling” featuring Troy’s pipes, followed by the lengthy workout “State of Grace“.  The string-laden ballad “Moment in Time” is one song that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on “Delicate Flame of Desire”, and again features Troy’s pipes, along with some great slide guitar from Enrico.  The three-part epic “Forsaken” is perhaps the high spot of the album, tremendously moving vocals from Lisa Fury on the opening section, the symphonic instrumental “Glowing Embers” flowing seamlessly back into a reprise of the opening part.  Lots of prog bands have attempted epics like that over the years, but very few succeed as magnificently.

It’s been a long time coming, but Karnataka have delivered the first essential progressive rock album of 2010.

Previous Mostly Autumn live albums have been something of a disappointment.  There have been quite a few, and they’ve all too frequently been poor-quality recordings that have failed to capture the power and beauty of York’s finest progressive rock band a live setting.

The two disks comprising Live 2009 are a quite different prospect.  Recorded over a number of dates on the spring 2009 tour, this time they’ve really managed to capture what it was like to be in the front row at one of the those electrifying gigs.  They’ve taken care in mixing and mastering so that you can hear every instrument and voice from the eight-piece live band clearly, from Bryan Josh’s Gilmouresque guitar to Anne-Marie Helder’s flute and Olivia Sparnenn’s backing vocals. The end result simply blows every previous Mostly Autumn live release out of the water.

They’ve very sensibly decided to release the entire show bar an ill-advised cover played as the final encore.  Somewhat controversially it’s being sold as two separate disks rather than a double-CD, but I’ve reviewing both of them together.

Part I, the shorter of the two disks comprises the first set of the band’s live show, and largely showcases songs with Heather Findlay singing lead.  Opening hard rocker “Fading Colours” is vastly superior to the studio version from “Heart Full of Sky” and sets the tone for the rest of the set, right through to the mesmerising closing number, Heather’s signature song “Evergreen”.  I’ve always found that song a sort of modern-day version of “Freebird”.  An unexpected highlight is Heather’s “Unoriginal Sin”, the song from the recent “Glass Shadows” transformed into an immensely-powerful emotionally-charged piece of music.  The harmonies from Olivia Sparnenn and Anne-Marie Helder show just what a band with three top-class female singers is capable of.

Part II carries on where the first disk left off, starting after the interval and including the encore, which makes it significantly longer than part I. It’s more of a balance between the two singers, with more of Bryan Josh’s vocals on songs like the electric folk-rock of “Winter Mountain” and “The Dark Before The Dawn” and of course the epic encore “Heroes Never Die”, with that flute intro from Anne-Marie Helder that never fails to raise the hairs on the back of the neck. Heather’s vocals shine again on the sparse-but-beautiful “Above the Blue”, and the magnificent set-closer “Carpe Diem” culminating in the intertwining vocal and guitar lines building to a symphonic wall of sound. We’ve also got Heather and Olivia performing “Never the Rainbow” as a duet, closing with Olivia’s voice duelling with Bryan Josh’s guitar.

I thought at the time that the 2009 line up of Mostly Autumn was the best live incarnation of the band I’ve ever heard; the return of Iain Jennings on keys and Liam Davidson on second guitar filled out the sound, and Gavin Griffiths on drums added a boost to the energy level that was missing from previous tours. And while Heather Findlay has always been my favourite female vocalist, she lifted her singing to a new level; pouring her entire heart and soul into songs like “Unoriginal Sin” and “Carpe Diem”.  With Heather now announcing her departure from the band to embark upon a solo career, these two disks are a fitting way to mark what has turned out to be the end of an era.

The albums can be ordered online from Mostly Autumn Records.

This album came out at the end of last year, but although I commented extensively on message boards about how good it was, I was too busy at the time to write a proper review.  This review is therefore better late than never.

Time to launch the Five Songs Meme into the blogolivejournalfacebooksphere once again.

It’s quite simple – list five songs, preferably accompanied by a word or two explaining their significance.  Not your five greatest songs of all time, but five songs you’re really into at the moment in time.

• Mostly Autumn – Unoriginal Sin.
  Listening to last years excellent “Live 2009″ album reminded me of just how powerful a piece of music this is; some tremendous multilayered harmonies that show just what a band with three top-class female vocalists can do, and carries an incredible emotional charge.  It’s also one of the relatively few recent Mostly Autumn songs where Heather Findlay is the sole composer of both lyrics and music.  Quite unlike anything the band have done before, I wonder how much this song is an indicator of the sort of direction Heather might take in her solo career.
• Breathing Space – Questioning Eyes
  Breathing Space’s big epic was the Classic Rock Society’s song of the year for 2009, and was a worthy winner.  Like the previous song, it’s one where knowing something of the back-story heightens the emotional impact; for me, just hearing the intro always brings a lump to the throat.  There’s a great YouTube video of the first ever live performance of this song at Bilston Robin 2 last May, a gig at which I was present, and I remember congratulating co-writer Iain Jennings immediately afterwards.
• Panic Room – Dark Star
  Yes, another female-fronted prog song, I’m afraid.  This song is to “Satellite” what “Apocalypstick” was to “Visionary Position“, only with dramatic organ chords instead of the spiralling electric violin.
• Dream Theater – Trail of Tears
  DT’s “Falling into Infinity” album gets some stick for being too slick and radio-friendly, and reeling in the extended muso jams that characterised just about everything else they’ve ever done.  Only right at the end of the album did they get to do a 13-minute epic, and this is that.  John Petrucci’s solo is just jaw-dropping.
• Gustav Holst – Mars, Bringer of War
  Before I discovered rock’n'roll in my teens, I listened to a lot of classical music under the influence of my parents.  I always loved “Mars”, and it’s probably the reason than as soon as I discovered Rock I headed straight for the section labelled “METAL!!”. This may have been written in 1916 and be played by an orchestra, but this is surely one of the first ever heavy metal instrumentals.  And of course, it’s in 5/4 time, which is very Prog.

To join this meme, choose your five songs, and list them on your blog, Livejournal or whatever.  If you don’t have a blog, just leave an entry in the comments here.

The Guardian’s Luke Lewis isn’t impressed with Metal Hammer’s proposal that “Metal” be listed as a religion in the 2011 census.

Sadly, this will never work. Having been employed by Kerrang! magazine, I know what metalheads are like. Any attempt to show a united front would soon descend into petty, factionalist squabbling. The grindcore fans would gang up on the sludge-metal fans. The stoner fans would call everyone else “pussies”. And the average black-metal fan wouldn’t get involved at all – he’d just stand aloof, looking grim-faced and pretending he’s called Horgoth and hails from the Frozen North (Trondheim), when in reality he’s called Barry and hails from the freezing north-east (South Shields).

What?  Factional squabbles and sectarianism?  That will be just like real religion, then.  And while we have to see Slayer fans starting literal holy wars, you could count those church-burning Norwegian black-metallers as religiously-motivated terrorists.

Indeed, there are just so many parallels between organised religion and hardcore music fandom it’s impossible not to laugh. Ever heard of a church splitting up because of musical differences? It happens. A lot. All those organists and choirmasters with rock star sized egos….

As for rock star excess, who remembers “I’m the Bishop of Southwark. It’s what I do.“?

Great quote from deep within a 1000+ comment thread on The Guardian Music Blog. It’s on the weekly Readers Recommend blog, where after the deadline at noon on Monday it turns by tradition into an open thread, and the subject turned to the uses and abuses of history.  Readers Recommend regular Abahachi had this to say:

History is great at explaining why something happened, and reasonably good at offering explanations of what is currently happening, and that’s why it’s vital. On the whole historians are very realistic about the limitations of their knowledge and foresight, and will be the first to say “Yes, but it’s more complicated than that.” It’s people like the damned economists, who convince themselves (largely by ignoring all of history) that they fully understand the way the world works and so can issue instructions about how it should be refashioned according to their views on how it ought to work, that are dangerous.

Indeed. Economists who set themselves up as experts in totally unrelated fields from criminology to climate science are an absolute bloody menace. And because they’ve got academic qualifications too many people who ought to know better (such as politicians) take them seriously, despite the fact that qualifications in economics aren’t always relevant outside their field.  It’s like expecting literary critics to be good at engineering (or vice-versa).

Panic Room’s debut, Visionary Position was a complex multilayered album largely composed in the studio, which gave the band some real headaches when trying to work out how on earth a five-piece band were going to reproduce it all live. In contrast, the followup is largely made up from songs the band had been playing live before entering the studio, many of them very familiar to people who’ve seen the band on tour over the past couple of years.

This result is an album of shorter, more direct songs – there are no sprawling epics along the lines of Visionary Position’s “The Dreaming” this time around.  The very different musical backgrounds of the five members combine in an alchemical mix which results in far more than the sum of the parts. Elements of hard rock, prog, pop, folk and jazz contribute to a sound that defies easy pigeonholing beyond the broad category of ‘rock’.  It doesn’t really pretend to be a prog album, or worse still, pretend not to be.  It’s precisely the sort of thing with crossover appeal; just enough musical depth to appeal to the prog fan, but without being too dense or complex to appeal to the fan of mainstream rock.

As with the debut, the musicianship is superb throughout, although always playing what the song requires rather than playing loads of random notes just for the sake of it.  Anne-Marie Helder again demonstrates that she’s not only a tremendously expressive vocalist but a very thought-provoking lyricist, and Jon Edwards shines on keys, especially his Ray Manzarek-like playing on “Picking Up Knives” and the doom-laden organ chords heralding “Dark Star”.

Musically it’s hugely varied, ranging from powerful hard rockers to gentle semi-acoustic numbers to big soaring ballads, all of which show just how versatile a singer Anne-Marie can be.  “Black Noise” written by bassist Alun Vaughan might even be described as ‘Industrial funk-metal’, and “I am a Cat” with it’s meowing guitars has to be the strangest song on the album.  High spots for me are the heard-rending “The Fall”, the atmospheric “Yasuni”, a tale of environmental destruction in the name of oil, and the apocalyptic organ-driven “Dark Star” with it’s lyrical theme of the destructive potential that lies within all of us.  We are all dark stars, Anne-Marie reminds us.  As the anthemic chorus of the epic title track fades away it’s clear that talented rock bands do not recognise the concept of the ‘difficult second album’.

As with many independently-released albums the band financed it with a fan pre-order, which was dispatched towards the end of last year.  The retail edition was released today, January 25th.  The band are on tour during March, and are well worth catching live.

When Chris Johnson left Mostly Autumn at the beginning of 2008 he stated that he was to work on a solo album. In the coming months touring as Fish’s second guitarist took up a lot of his time, but when I asked him about his solo project when I met him in York at the end of the year he told me it was still on track, and had some interesting collaborators.

The Fabric is that album. The collaborators turned out to be Panic Room and Mostly Autumn vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Anne-Marie Helder, Mostly Autumn, Panic Room and Fish’s drummer Gavin Griffiths, and two of Chris’ long-term associates, bassist Patrick Berry and guitarist Simon Snaize, The album also features guest appearances on a few tracks from Heather Findlay, Olivia Sparnenn and Bryan Josh.

This is certainly an album that took me a few listens for this one to click; on the surface it’s an indie-sounding album with it’s sparse chiming guitars and clattering drums; but listen more closely and there’s some real musical depth there. Chris Johnson sings the majority of the lead vocals with Anne-Marie taking a largely supporting role singing harmonies and middle eights, which may disappoint some fans of Anne-Marie’s vocals, but this is basically Chris’ album.

High spots are many, the menacing-sounding “The Dogs” ending with a lacerating solo from Simon Snaize, “The Diamond” where Anne-Marie makes my heart melt with the line “For a while.. you were mine”, and the wonderfully atmospheric “High Life” again featuring some tremendous wordless vocals from Anne-Marie at the end. The album closes with the epic harmony-filled “Ending” perhaps the closest in sound to Chris’ work with Mostly Autumn, a connection made stronger with a great solo from Bryan Josh.

Like many self-released prog albums, this was released as a pre-order some time ago, but has a full retail release on Monday 25th January.  You can stream some of the music from the band’s website, www.paradeband.com.

Everyone being on tour at once is usually what happens in November and December, but this year April is just silly. It seems every female-fronted prog band is on tour that month.

It starts with what is likely to be a very emotional farewell gig for Heather Findlay with Mostly Autumn on April 2nd in Leamington Spa. Just two days later will be Olivia Sparnenn’s final performance with Breathing Space at Bilston Robin 2. I hope to attend both if I can sort out the logistics.

The following Saturday is Olivia’s debut as Mostly Autumn’s official frontwoman, in Gloucester. It’s a long way to travel just for one gig, but I attended the Gloucester shows on the last two occasions MA played there, and they were among the best of the tour each time.

Friday 16th April is the only currently-announced gig by Karnataka that doable for me – the others are all just too far away. They’re playing The Flowerpot in Derby.

The following weekend is one of those with two gigs in two different cities. Mostly Autumn return to Manchester Academy on the Friday, a rare local gig for me, and on Saturday The Reasoning play the O2 Academy in London.

There’s another two gigs in two nights the next weekend – The Reasoning play Bury Met on the Thursday, and on Friday Panic Room are supporting Hawkwind in Cardiff. I haven’t seen Hawkwind for many, many years; indeed I’m not even sure of Anne-Marie Helder was even born last time I saw them.

As I said, a bit of a manic month. And there are gig in March and May too…

Just posted this to the Official Mostly Autumn forum, but I think it’s worth reposting here.

I think I can post something a bit for reflective and forward-looking now I’ve had a few days to think things over.

I’m sure Mostly Autumn will remain a superb live band with Livvy singing lead. Having heard her sing “The Gap Is Too Wide” several with Breathing Space, I admire her ability to take a song and make it hers. I’d expect the band will drop Heather’s deeply personal songs from the setlist (can you imagine anyone but Heather singing “Above the Blue” or “Unoriginal Sin”? I can’t), but I’m looking forward to hearing her sing things like “Fading Colours” or “Carpe Diem”, which she is more than capable of doing justice. She deserves nothing less than our full support.

I think the band do have something to prove with the new album, which is how the new Mostly Autumn will be judged by the armchair critics who don’t go to gigs. People expecting a Bryan Josh solo album in all but name, don’t forget that Livvy is a songwriter as well as a singer. She co-wrote most of Breathing Space’s “Below the Radar”, an album I personally rate more highly than “Glass Shadows”, and has the leading credit for “Questioning Eyes”, the Classic Rock Society’s song of the year.

As for Heather, it’s not as if she’s retiring from music and we’ll never see or hear her sing again. I think there is a feeling that the time was right to leave; maybe her creative partnership with Bryan had simply run it’s course – 13 years and seven albums is a longer than average run for any band. The absolutely electrifying live shows throughout 2009 meant her time with the band ended on a high, which is the way to do it, nothing worse than a band going through the motions once the creative spark has died. While I have no idea what direction her solo album will take, I’m confident she’ll come up with something that retains the magic from her years with Mostly Autumn.

Finally I do have to say that a few casual fans (not necessarily on this forum) just don’t understand the sense of loss many of us have felt over the past few days. I’ve read comments ranging from the cluelessly insensitive to the mean-spirited and downright nasty in some places. Makes me appreciate the fact that this forum is moderated.

I appreciate not all readers of this blog really care about an obscure York progressive rock band, but they’ve been a major part of my life over the past few years, and it means a lot to me.

Sometimes a bombshell comes completely out of the blue.

Heather Findlay is leaving Mostly Autumn to concentrate of a solo career. The news came late on Thursday night, and I’m still trying to come to terms with it. I’m completely devastated in a way people for whom music is background wallpaper or a once-a-year trip to an enormodome will never be able to understand.

I first saw Mostly Autumn live at Jillys in Manchester back in 2004, and have seem them 40-odd times since, 30 of those in the past three years. Their music has changed my life over the past few years in ways I could never have anticipated, and helped me through some difficult times.

And there’s just something uniquely magical about Mostly Autumn’s live shows; no other band is quite like it for me. Seeing another great band live is like visiting an exotic location on holiday, seeing Mostly Autumn feels like coming home. I’ve made so many great friends through Mostly Autumn fandom it feels like an extended family.

Although I’ve only met Heather a handful of times, she has always treated me like a personal friend.

Mostly Autumn are to continue, with their backing vocalist Olivia Sparnenn taking over on lead vocals. The knock on effect of that is that Olivia will be leaving her own band, Breathing Space, another great band I’ve seen almost as many times as Mostly Autumn, and who now face an uncertain future.

While there’s going to be a new-look Mostly Autumn, and we’ve got Heather’s solo project to look forward to, I need time to reflect on what we’ve lost before I can really start to look towards to the future.

The absolutely electrifying live shows in 2009 meant Heather’s time with Mostly Autumn ended on a high. She will be playing one last farewell show with the band, at The Assembly in Leamington Spa on Good Friday, April 2nd. I’ve already got my ticket.