Something much lighter than the past few updates.
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29. Spock’s Beard – The Kindness of Strangers (1998) Yay, more prog! Spock’s Beard tend to be hit or miss among progressive rock fans, at least that’s true in my circle of friends. Spock’s Beard are best known probably as the band Neal Morse was formerly in, before he chased down a solo career and joined forced with Mike Portnoy (among others) in Transatlantic. This is a shame really, because even after Morse’s departure, the band continued to make great music and they still do to this day. That said, it’s good to see that Neal has absolutely no hard feelings with the current band members (including his brother, Alan, who is a beast on the guitar) as he regularly joins forces with them on stage.
So, here is ‘The Kindness of Strangers’, the Beard’s third album and it’s my favourite by them. This is for a large part because of
Flow, the song I consider to be my second favourite Spock’s Beard tune, behind
The Light from their debut. For what it’s worth,
The Doorway from ‘Beware of Darkness’ would round off the top 3. Really, to me the first three albums are all great and I could have include any of the three here, but I went with their third, because it’s the most consistent to me and doesn’t contain any ‘filler’ whatsoever.
This album contains two great Spock’s Beard rockers,
The Mouth of Madness and
Cakewalk on Easy Street, but also the toned-down almost prog-rock classic
June, a song Neal Morse likes to revisit often. Rounding off the track-list are my aforementioned favourite, two more prog-epics (
The Good Don’t Last and
Harm’s Way) and what’s probably the worst song on the album,
Strange World. With the Beard being a prog-rock band, it’s would be weird to have this album listed as your favourite and then not mention the epics as your favourites from the album. That said, my favourite really is a level above the others. Here is a special mention for the first section of the song, but more notably that stunning ending guitar solo. A beautiful moment of almost ugly notes, against a great backdrop of progressive goodness.
This album is all that the Beard is wrapped into an awesome package. It’s got the melodies, it’s got the rockers, it’s got the epics and it’s got quirkiness. Lots of good stuff can be found on this record. Even though it might not be for everybody, this album remains a delight to listen to occasionally.
Favourite song: Flow
Other songs worth checking out: Harm’s Way, June, The Good Don’t Last
Other stuff by this band: You really can’t go wrong with any album by this band. Although the line-up changed drastically when Neal Morse decided to leave, the band has put out good albums exclusively (although there’s some duds on certain records). My favourites would have to be ‘The Light’, ‘Beware of Darkness’, ‘V’ and ‘Brief Nocturnes and Dreamless Sleep’.