Artist: Lonely Robot
Title: Please Come Home
Genre: Prog Rock
Release Date: 23rd February 2015
Label: Insideout
Album Review
At first glance, this seems like a really bad dream where members of various 80’s pop bands come to your house, swap hair-spray tips and then play a few songs together until interrupted by MARILLION’s frontman knocking on the door and asking if he can join in. And so we have ringleader John Mitchell (of IT BITES, FROST and ARENA fame) joined variously by Nick Beggs (KAJAGOOGOO), NIK KERSHAW, Peter Cox (GO WEST), English actor Lee Ingleby doing a spot of narrating, and Steve Hogarth (MARILLION) tinkling the ivories and lending some backing vocals. Oh, and it’s a concept album, but we won’t concern ourselves with that here…
The album stamps its proggy feet firmly on intro ‘Airlock’ before settling into the muscular groove of ‘God Vs Man’, floaty vocals and tumbling drums giving the verses an other-worldy feel. ‘The Boy In The Radio’ has the rich baritone of Peter Cox all over it, but despite him being an excellent vocalist, his style seems to badly date a song that already sounds dated. This is standard rock mush really and pretty uninteresting. ‘Why Do We Stay’ changes the pace with soft piano and added female vocals, whereas the title track opens with a melancholy narration and then soars and dips and weaves with a real sense of ease. It’s here where the experience of the various players becomes apparent, the song feeling organic and coaxed into life, the overall impression is of watching some mini-opera unfold, dramatically refined.
At times the self-indulgent guitar solo - yes, that old bore - threatens to swamp things in blandness, as on the painful ‘A Godless Sea, but the gentle sway of ‘Human Being’ soon puts things back on course. There’s a real sense here of lonely optimism, if such a thing exists, where a kind of euphoria grows from the desolation. And the come-down concludes with the sparse piano and hushed vocals of final song ‘The red Balloon’, less than two minutes long and every second essential. ‘Please Come Home’ is a comfortable excursion through accessible modern prog-rock, dreamily evocative at times, wearily clunky at others, but always intriguing and definitely not the bad dream it appeared at first glance.
Tracklist
01. Airlock
02. God Vs Man
03. The Boy In The Radio
04. Why Do We Stay?
05. Lonely Robot
06. A Godless Sea
07. Oubliette
08. Constructy/Obstruct
09. Are We Copies?
10. Human Being
11. The Red Balloon
Line-up
John Mitchell – Vocals, guitar, bass, keyboard
Craig Blundell – Drums
Nick Beggs – Additional Bass
Website
http://www.facebook.com/johnchristianmitchell
Cover Picture
Rating
Music: 7
Sound: 7
Total: 7 / 10
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