IMAGINÆRIUM: Siege (PROGRESSIVE ROCK): review / opinion to read on Music Waves

Imaginaerium is a project that was born out of a collaboration between guitarist Eric Brouillette and keyboardist Clive Nolan. Eric sadly passed away shortly before the release of their first album, “The Rise of Medici”, but Clive revived the project, keeping Laura Piazzai on vocals and changing the rest of the line-up. Presented with superb design featuring Viking-inspired imagery (among other things), “Siege” is based on a fairly vague concept: resistance and refuge.

Clive has always been a storyteller: while his collaborations with Oliver Wakeman (‘Jabberwocky’ and ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’) are adaptations, his projects Caamora and Alchemy, which are more oriented towards rock opera (or musicals), are based on original scripts. ‘Rise’ is a different exercise, with a fairly loose theme that mixes very diverse concepts ranging from the life of Boadicea (Boudica in English), a resistance fighter against the Roman invaders around 60 AD, to the internalisation or preparation for battles... An ambitious attempt that produces a hybrid result that is not easy to digest. Not musically, as Clive composes easily accessible tracks, but in terms of the overall coherence, which seems fragile to say the least.

The opening track, ‘Cry Boudica’, resolutely and effectively plays the epic narrative card: with its warlike chorus and effective guitar solo, this track is full of energy and manages to hook the listener. After that, things go downhill on many levels: unlike Rise of the Medici, which benefited from a very coherent musical atmosphere, the whole is very heterogeneous in spirit: Hispanic-style guitar with castanets on “To The Victor Go The Spoils”, warlike instrumentals carried by synths (“To The Victor Go The Spoils”), piano and vocals (“When My Eyes Are Closed”) and synths and vocals (“Deep”), while some tracks show a decline in the quality of the composition: “Never Burn The Cakes” (very tongue-in-cheek, but still lightweight *), “Footprints”, saved by the bass, “The Final Redoubt” with content already heard on Clive, “When My Eyes Are Closed”, poorly inspired.

Otherwise, the arrangements are standard Nolan: layered keyboards for a symphonic touch (a solo synth appearance on ‘To The Victor Go The Spoils’), often polished bass, a fair amount of emphasis on most tracks, further emphasised by the vocal performance: Laura Piazzai claims on her website to have a powerful rock voice, and she certainly doesn't shy away from (over)using it, overacting on the quiet tracks and seeking out every opportunity to ‘belt it out’ on the less quiet ones - the final note of “All There is to See” could feature in the pantheon of ‘The Voice’. As for Clive, he adopts a more raspy tone than usual, with aesthetically questionable results (the opening of “Blood Moon”, or “The Last Arrow”, where he overdoes the martial tone of the track).

So was it necessary to revive the Imaginaerium project? Far from the aesthetic and conceptual success of its predecessor, Siege ultimately shines only in its opening track and its finale, directly affiliated with Nolan-Wakeman's Chasing the Hound (with a fade-out ending here...). That's not much for a side project by one of prog's best-known keyboardists...

* “Never Burn the Cakes” is based on a tiny detail in the life of King Alfred, a great and almost irreproachable monarch, liberator and unifier of the Anglo-Saxons (849-899). The anecdote has it that this king let cakes burn... the moral of the story is that nobody's perfect! - Official website

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