The Circus And The Nightwhale reviews

You know how it is: you sit in your British suburban room, or your Paris atelier, or for that matter your somewhat ramshackle Pacific Northwest home in the middle of winter, watching the almost Biblical torrents of rain cascade down, before putting on a new album that somehow blends rock, blues, folk, jazz and a touch of fantasia with lovingly curated archival sound effects in one insinuating collage that transports you body and soul back into the vanished world of London in the 1950s and beyond, so much so that you can almost taste the peasoup fog. No, sorry. I'm getting ahead of myself. You probably don't know how it is, and frankly neither did I before listening to Steve Hackett's wonderful new release The Circus and the Nightwhale, and its opening track 'People of the Smoke'. But this is what the record does to you right from the start, immersing you in a world so vivid and immediate that two dimensions naturally become three in the course of a song-cycle that's by turns introspective and jubilant, sometimes wistful, often theatrical, and always exquisite in its musicianship.

Older listeners may at times hark back to a certain now 50-year-old LP with a broadly similar pilgrim's-progress concept on which Hackett also performs, although fond as many of us are of 1974's The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, it's a pleasure to report that the present album never quite plumbs the surrealistic depths of that flawed Genesis masterpiece. Instead, what we get here is a set of thirteen tightly-constructed songs, few of which are content to settle for the demands of playlist-pleasing, box-ticking blandness, and that, like their creator, resolutely shun the lure of the pigeonhole. A track might start off with a kaleidoscopic wash evoking the dreamily wistful air of a circus - possibly not unlike the newly-opened Battersea Park funfair of Hackett's youth - before swerving into a smoky blues; or, equally, introduce itself with a guitar riff that might not have disappointed Jimmy Page in his pomp, before ending up in a soundscape of salty nauticalisms.

In a sense, the whole album is like that. The songs simply refuse to line up in an orderly fashion and announce themselves as slow or fast, as upbeat or introspective, or even as strictly rock or classical. They're all things at once, with fist-pumping riffs, proggy 12-string guitars, swelling drums, flutes and supple orchestrations on display not only throughout the record as a whole but sometimes within the same tune. Simply put, this is music for all tastes and all comers, the aural equivalent of what a stylistic collision between Rembrandt and Picasso deep in his Blue Period might look like, if you can imagine such a thing; uncategorisable, maybe, but unmistakably vivid and arresting and consistently brilliant. These things are necessarily subjective, but I'll go out on a limb and unhesitatingly describe The Circus and the Nightwhale as not only Hackett's most personal, but also his finest, album yet - no small accolade, trust me.

The Circus And The Nightwhale reviews

NAVIGATION