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Spock's Beard: Neal Morse (vocals, guitar, piano, synthesizer); Al Morse (guitar, cello, Mellotron); Ryo Okumoto (Hammond organ, Mellotron); Dave Merros (bass); Nick D'Virgilio (drums). Spock's Beard are the quintessential American progressive rock band. Their music has consistently been brave, restless, and often visionary. On Snow, a double-CD concept album, they go for broke. Creatively, this is a new direction for the band in the sense that carrying out a sustained narrative of this magnitude stretches all compositional notion, as well as those surrounding production, arrangement, and consistency of voice. There is so much weight placed on each track to move a story forward, either expressionistically or narratively, that getting bogged down in it is always a risk. Happily, that is not the case here. Spock's Beard have taken all of their strengths instrumentally, lyrically, and vocally, and concentrated them in this effort about an albino boy on a noble, if idiosyncratic, quest. While concept albums have been done on much loftier notions, they seem to falter under their own weight, or the light of actual history. Here, Neal and Alan Morse, and their bandmates, use a much more subjective fantasy story, and create a spiritual, physical, ideological, and emotional set of circumstances that follow their protagonist through 26 songs. Musically, Snow is a wonder, it's full of nuance and texture, taut dynamics and lush arrangements, that are all, seemingly, of a piece,. While some Spock's Beard fans might have a hard time with the softer, gentler side of the band that is evidenced here, it would be tough to argue that this change of direction was both necessary and warranted. Spock's Beard has been pushing at their own boundaries for a while now, and with Snow, they shatter them and enter into the very promise of what progressive rock is always supposed to deliver: discovering some heretofore unknown sonic territory via the individual and collective focus of creating through the applied effort of one's best musical efforts. Snow is an allegory, it is an archetypal story that is ambitious in scope and redemptive in result, and is a thoroughly rewarding -- if challenging -- listen. ~ Thom Jurek
