Progressive rock, at its worst,
becomes all about the enormous chops
of each member of the band. For me,
at its best, those chops are coupled
with and secondary to great songs,
memorable melodies, strong pop hooks,
and smart lyrics. The Pineapple Thief
has found the perfect prog rock recipe
for me. Bruce Soord is an accomplished
songwriter, has a lovely singing voice,
gentle, tuneful, dare I say, pretty,
and his guitar playing moves from the
heavy hard rock riff to easy strumming
to nuanced picking. But the guitar is
not always the main instrument, as
the first track on It Leads To This
begins with piano. In the prog rock
tradition, there are lots of cool changes,
odd time signatures, sophisticated
breaks, and my favorite thing: the
great drumming of Gavin Harrison.
Gavin gets around. He plays with
Steven Wilson in another P band,
Porcupine Tree, he’s played with King
Crimson, and on Wilson’s first
solo album. His drumming is precise,
inventive, bombastic, full of
a terrific groove and never excessive.
I have two albums by The Pineapple Thief
twelve years apart from each other,
so I have a nice view of the trajectory
of their music, and I would advise the
curious to go backward in the catalog,
because it seems to me that they have
made monstrously great strides forward.
It Leads To This is a fantastic album,
so good I listened to it twice consecutively,
while All The Wars is simply solid.
And the key difference for me is that
the latter material is more melodic,
fun to sing along with, instrumentally
spacious, more subtle, more dynamic.
Their catalog at this point is pretty
vast, and I haven’t heard a giant
swath of it, but I’m betting that you
could do worse than just closing your
eyes and randomly choosing any of their
records without fear of disappointment.
Their brand new album, Far and Wide,
is currently the first thing on my
wish list.
Notes on the vinyl editions:
- All the Wars, Scope Records, 2023 reissue of the 2012 album, black vinyl
- It Leads to This, Kscope Records, 2024, translucent baby blue vinyl.
In case you don’t already know: I’m listening to almost everything in my vinyl collection, A to Z, and writing at least one, sometimes two or three long skinny poem-like-things in response for each artist, and on a few occasions, writing a long skinny poem-like-thing in response to more than one artist. As a poet and a student of poetry, I understand that these things look like poems, but they don’t really sound much like poetry, hence, I call them “poem-like-things.” I’ll admit that they’re just long, skinny essays that veer every now and then into the poetic or lyric.
