| All the
album's songs are linked to the time theme but in different
ways. The pieces "Encapsulated", "Unforgiving
Skies" and "The Time Capsule" dealing with the
more socialogical aspects, and "The Sea" and
"Promises of Life" taking more personal views of
time's passage. "The Single" is a tongue-in-cheek
stadium rocker that works around the idea that the BBC and
others are writing history in order that their documentation
of the present will be the accepted truth of the future,
therefore enabling them to continue to profit from it!. This
album was Gareth Harwoods first album with the band, giving
Po90 a harder edge, there was less lead guitar, rather a surge
of powerful incisive riffing and texture. keyboards dominate a
little more than on "Afterlifecycle" yet in a noisy
way rather than getting too pleasant! reviews below......
REVIEWof
The Time Capsule
| This album
marked the band's most adventurous outing to date, (and that's
saying something) and is undeniably a concept album. However,
in the manner of the most succesful concept albums, it's very
difficult to actually tell what it's about. Time is evidently
a good place to start though. In the first few minutes we are
whisked from a crackly old 78 rpm style recording of 1920s and
30s radio shows, through various world events, up to the
present day... even a snatch of Pink Floyd in there. This all
cuts into "Encapsulated" with its meandering
acoustic guitars and sinister lyrics. "We want our
Century to stay alive intact" seems to be the chorus if
there is one. The track blasts off without warning, just as
you thought it was all going to be nice, heaves its way
through a powerful section remeniscent of Ozrics with Keith
Emerson trashing an organ somewhere in the background before
collapsing in a pile of feedback with a mellotron going out of
tune. Hmmmm.. not exactly radio one stuff is it? Out of the
chaos comes the whimsical "Promises of life", not my
personal favourite, but pleasant all the same. An
ambient section follows, occasionally punctuated by a very
un-ambient drum pattern before we arrive at some more real
meat..."Unforgiving Skies" Once again starting with
the same meandering guitar theme of "Encapsulated",
this track suddenly jumps into some really heavy stuff,
grinding bass, walloping loud guitar and a piano part that
sounds like something off "Aladdin Sane" The whole
effect is definitely remeniscent of Pawn Hearts era Van Der
Graaf Generator. This has to be one of the best tracks here,
in just less than 10 minutes we go through numerous changes of
mood and tempo, the song finally climaxing with a powerful
hook chorus over wah wah guitars and incessant rhythm. |
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"The
Sea" follows, based on a piece by swedish keyboards
player Bo Hansonn, from which the band took their name. His
track "The Sun" was subtitled "Parallel or 90
Degrees", and this song follows the original riff, but
adds lyrics and a new chorus. Its' atmospheric fusion,
bubbling electric pianos, with synthesiser textures, an
overall feel like the quieter moments of Porcupine Tree's
"Moonloop". This leads to "Blues For
Lear", a powerful ballad of a man alienated from the
world by his own success. A chord sequence vaguely remeniscent
of Gershwin's "Summertime" begins the piece which
develops into another very intense chorus. This one (as with
Run In Rings on "Afterlifecycle") has a Roger
Waters/Pink Floyd feel to it with its sound effects and
personalised storyline. Then we are into the ironically titled
"The Single", which appears to be a kind of pastiche
of Corporate Rock. Its firmly tongue in cheek here, this is
obviously the commercial track on the album, but its lyrics
seem to denounce the song anyway. It all rocks along nicely
with a catchy hook line, a wild synthesiser solo, real Chris
Squire style rickenbacker bass and a Chuck Berry guitar solo.
The whole thing fades out with some Twin Guitars a la
Wishbone, and PO90 seem to have captured every cliche in the
book. It's back to the serious stuff again though for
the 20 minute suite based around the already stated themes.
It's not just repeats though. The lyrics are those of the
first track "encapsulated", but the music style is
more upbeat after an orchestral section. The piece winds
through variations on the themes, through spacey sections, a
tranquil piano solo before climaxing in a major big finish,
(not before the track appears to explode for no apparent
reason in a subsection entitled "Ritual Hammond
Thrashing") This track is where PO90 succeed so well in
tying the album together. It's a tour de force comparable with
their "Afterlifecycle" sequence on the preceding
album. The album finishes with the curious "Aftertimecapsule"
a tranquil instrumental. You listen to it, and wonder about
where you've heard something like it before, and they don't
give the game away until the last two notes.
Dave
Winter Nov 1998
Andy's thoughts
on the album.......
As
essentially a follow up to "Afterlifecycle",
"Capsule" deals once again with real matters
relating to real people, this time the main theme being,
pretty obviously, Time.. PO90 have made this album under no
illusions... it seems that as the much talked about Millenium
approaches, people are not becoming just aware of their future
possibilities, but also aware of their insignificance in time
as a whole. The fact is that history, which was once made by
the people in it, is now being recorded by a media industry
with its own ideas about the future, and our century will be
viewed from the future via the audio and video recordings of
today's industry. The band's feelings about this are that the
media industry will misrepresent us to the future, as they
already do. In the field of Progressive Rock music in which
PO90 operate, lies a prime (if largely unimportant) example.
The "progressive" movement is hidden, ignored and
forgotten by all major media companies, broadcasters and
record companies alike. Their priorites are not to keep this
music alive, they hardly even revisit some of its best
moments. The media industry will promote the image of the
twentieth century to the future in the way it wants to, not in
the way it actually happened. You can be sure that Progressive
Music is not on the list of priorities. On a larger scale than
the mere genre issue, "Capsule" looks at the way we
want our own time to live on, how we see a future built on the
foundations we created now, without giving much thought to the
fact that this society only exists as a result of destroying
others. So many of us have such a limited knowledge of history
that we are hard pushed to pin down the centuries in which say
Beethoven, Nostradamus, Thomas Cromwell lived, yet we expect
people in the future to know whether Duran Duran came before
or after the Beatles. Our petty insular view of time makes it
strange to even think that Elvis Presley, Glenn Miller, and
Pink Floyd are actually contemporaries in the greater scheme
of things.
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| All in all,
this album is a must for any fans of serious English music.
The group have an atmosphere about them that I haven't felt
since the heyday of prog-rock, but temper this with a full on
blitz of 90s power and imagination. If you haven't heard
any PO90, and you don't believe me, then click here
to sample some of their material. |
From Aural
Innovations www.aural-innovations.com
Here's another modern group whose
intention it is to further blur the lines between progressive,
psychedelic, and electronic music. Whereas most of us
open-minded music fans will favor this approach, the danger is
that militant prog purists might gasp at the ambient and
trancey bits, and the lo-fi space punkers might balk at the
thought of a perceived 'clean and sterile' sound. Oh well,
their loss. Po90° is a fine band, and I think 'Time Capsule'
is a little stronger than their 1997 release 'Afterlifecycle'
(CYCL060).
The first two-thirds of the album are
chalk full of quirky tunes that mix laid-back semi-acoustic
passages with more energetic choruses that are sometimes dark
and tension-building ("Encapsulated") and other
times are uplifting and trancelike ("Unforgiving
Skies"). "The Sea" is probably my favorite
individual song, a more subtle dreamy piece not unlike Sky
Cries Mary... perhaps the simplest tune even, but it works to
sooth the inner soul. This spirit is continued in "Blues
for Lear," though it turns a little 'loungey' and hence
comes across a tad schmaltzy. "The Single" rounds
out the individual tracks, an energetic but predictable tune,
though I do admire the band's commitment to 'truth in
advertising.'
The highlight of Time Capsule is the
22-minute title suite, made up of eight individual parts
including reprises of motifs heard earlier in the album. My
initial impression was cynical, given that 'side-long' epics
can hardly be considered anything but formulaic by now. So in
my mind, I challenged it to do something for me, and
eventually it succeeded. The cool spaceborne rhythmic jam
"The Sea Returns" made me perk up a bit, which was
just the set-up for the excellent "Thousands of Suns,
Myriads of Stars," growing slowly from ambient space with
additions of bass and percussion, eventually leading to a
final non-invasive trance rhythm outro. The following piece,
appropriately titled "Piano Solo," brings forth the
type of circular runs that Cyrille Verdeaux mastered on old
Clearlight albums of the 70's. Another nice touch. All in all,
this suite is everything that Fish's "Plague of
Ghosts" *should* have been. His pairing with the remix
duo Positive Light on that track just didn't succeed where
Po90° has here.
Because the songs are generally
well-written, and because the musicians and vocalist (Andy
Tillison) are solid, you can't go wrong with Po90°. I'm
certain that someone has already labeled the band, "Marillion
meets Pink Floyd" at least once, so I don't feel
responsible having quoted it. I know they happen to be fans of
Porcupine Tree, and I might be persuaded to agree there are
some similarities, but I do think Po90° have some original
charm. Oh, perhaps 'The Time Capsule' has a few redundancies
and would work better at 50 minutes rather than the full 72,
but I still have yet to cut them off mid-verse.
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