Dreadnaught, Have A Drink with Dreadnaught

Dreadnaught's 2001 album was front-and-center on these pages a couple of days ago. They are back some 13 years later with an EP, Have a Drink with Dreadnaught (Red Fez).

What applied to their first album is ditto here. They play a well-arranged kind of prog metal that has the markings of a musical vision that stands within the "tradition" of such music but goes beyond it into original territory.

The guitar work will get your attention, but bass and drums are busy and very engaged too.

The vocals do the job they intend. Songs may not be radio charters but the point is in the elaborate group sound, to my mind, and in that realm you are well served to check this out. If the first album has a slight edge over this one in my mind, this is an EP so of necessity covers less territory.

Nice band!

Mike Keneally, You Must Be This Tall

The term "progressive rock" in some ways became as unwelcome in the '70s as that of "cool jazz" in the '50s. Sure, in both cases the music sometimes suffered from excesses and the reaction against it with "punk" and "hard bop" was predictable and perhaps inevitable. Nonetheless there was plenty there in both cases of music that was totally valid, excellent, worth hearing still.

So if I tell you that Mike Keneally's album You Must Be This Tall (Exowax 2414) might be thought of as progressive rock today, you must not take that as to mean that you are in for some kind of pretentious synth version of the "1812 Overture" or something of that ilk.

It is complexly arranged compositional rock that takes the best of Zappa in his ambitious moments and groups like Yes and perhaps a hint of Pink Floyd's middle period . . . or at least it's music that has something in common with that, but made into a new something.

Keneally plays a very nice electric guitar along with acoustic, synths, bass and vocals. There are live drums much of the time played by Marco Minnemann. It's new advanced, "progressive" rock that rings true and does not at all play on nostalgia as much as builds a music on the foundations of the past.

Keneally is a guitarist with excellent taste and sound, a rock composer with a great sense. And the album fully satisfies a need for some hip complexity that always remains musical. So, there.

Ben Craven, Great & Terrible Potions: Ambitious Prog With Some Flare

It's prog day at Gapplegate. Today we wear special hats. Not really. Listening to Ben Craven's Great and Terrible Potions (Desert Comb 10006) you feel like it is music to herald some special occasion, whatever it might be. It's important sounding music. And that's cool. It has a middle period Pink Floyd orchestrated largeness to it. Walls of synths, sometimes spooky-sounding, soaring guitar lead parts towering over sound towers, psychedelic moments, witching-hour minor tonality, sprawling, rather long-formed opuses. In other words Prog in the capital /P/ sense.

It's the Australian progger's second album. It's been five years coming. He's doing the singing. The voice is respectable. He plays all the parts, apparently, and did the production.

The result is something to laud. Instrumentally it is a symphonic soundtrack for the mind. My only quibble: some of the vocal-melody lines are not as distinguished as they might be. There are definite moments but some of the other song lines form a slightly predictable sequencing. The instrumental blend is so singularly ambitious, though. The fact that Ben mostly pulls it off means that there is much here to dig. If his songwriting develops from here, look out!