*. The Reasoning .*

Album: And Another Thing (2012)(EP 4 Track's)

Genre: Prog Rock (Crossover Prog)  /  UK

The opener “One By One” sets the tone. Beginning with chiming guitar and a vocal melody with an echo of their earlier “Dark Angel”, it combines atmospheric verses with a rockier chorus and a brief instrumental break of interplaying guitar and keys. It’s all over in less than four minutes, but seems to pack an awful lot of music into so short a time. In contrast, “Pale Criminal” is an out-and-out ballad. With another beautiful vocal melody from Rachel Cohen it’s a song that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Karnataka’s “Delicate Flame of Desire”. “Apophenia” and “20 Grams” round off the EP in similar vein, mid-tempo numbers combining delicate vocal melodies with restrained instrumental virtuosity from Owain Roberts and keyboardist Tony Turrell. Lyrics cover things like “the experience of seeing meaningful patterns or connections in random or meaningless data” and Duncan MacDougall’s rather strange theories of the weight of the human soul. Not your typical rock’n'roll fare at all. The whole EP has a softer, more pared-back sound, with shorter songs reining in the prog-metal excesses of their recent past. There’s still plenty of depth in the arrangements, with a few nods to latter-day Marillion and Rush. But now Rachel Cohen’s vocals are given much more space to breathe, no longer in any danger of being swamped by the instrumentation. It’s a case of less being more. Even if none of the four songs quite reach the highest points of the first two albums, the result is nevertheless a more coherent and focussed effort than their last studio album, and it takes a very different musical direction from their early work. (www.kalyr.com)

RATING:  8.75 / 10   **MARVELLOUS**

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