COMEDY OF ERRORS: Spirit (PROGRESSIVE ROCK): review / opinion to read on Music Waves

Like the phoenix rising from its ashes, Comedy of Errors had produced a superb second album in 2011, more than 20 years after its first effort released in the golden age of neo-progressive rock. Since then, the Scots have put the machine back in motion with a biennial rhythm of publication. And after "Fanfare & Fantasy" released in 2013, the band from Glasgow offers us the continuation of its adventures in the form of a concept album focused on the human mind.

If "Disobey" seduced from the start, we have to admit that the beginning proposed by 'My Grief Lies All Within' is a bit confusing: after an electric chorus, a repetitive bass takes over, joined progressively by the other instruments and then by a hesitant vocal in canon, before a guitar solo comes to brighten up the end. A strange and somewhat shaky beginning, which fortunately does not reveal the 50 minutes that will follow. After this curious beginning, the listener is then offered a real neo-progressive symphony during which all the good ingredients of the genre are going to be unfolded during a sequence of the different tracks, organized in two movements.

Alternating with happiness pieces with an addictive melody, among which the main theme of the album that we find several times, and percussive instrumental passages, Comedy of Errors installs little by little a universe from which it is difficult to get out before the final. The themes are worked, the arrangements are shimmering and a particular effort is brought to the vocal harmonies.

Without falling into the clichés of the genre, the British place nevertheless some welcome guitar solos, while the keyboards alternate with happiness soaring climaxes and sounds typified 70's. The shadow of Pendragon hovers many times throughout the album, on the one hand by John Fitzgerald's bass playing which surprisingly reminds of Peter Gee's, but also on several passages straightly inherited from the "The World" period. Emblematic title of this resemblance, the central piece of the album ('Ascension' etc...) begins with an orgy of keyboards close to Jean-Michel Jarre, before taking a pronounced Pendragon-like accent, reinforced by the resumption of the magnificent theme of "Spirit". Far from confining to plagiarism, this analogy reinforces the quality of the neo-progressive rock which underlies all this album, and whose successive listenings will come to reinforce the addiction of the listener. As for the famous theme of "Spirit", we will find it one last time in the real coda of the album which takes the time to develop it in the form of a magnificent and soothing song.

In this world where neo-progressive bands regularly take the tangent towards metallic drifts, it is pleasing to note that a band like Comedy of Errors manages to stay in the basics of the genre, producing an album with a quality of composition above the average, thus delivering an almost perfect score that guarantees many emotions to the listener. "Spirit" is a great album, to be found in any playlist. - Official website

COMEDY OF ERRORS

SPIRIT

AUTOPRODUCTION

PROGRESSIVE ROCK