Label: Insideout Music
Release date: September 4, 2020
Production: Rikard Sjöblom
Length: 57.57 min
Genre: Progressive Rock
Rating: 9.0/10
Rikard Sjöblom is a Swedish musician best known as the head honcho of prog rockers Beardfish. After a run of very high-quality albums of progressive rock revivalism that drew its inspiration from the genre’s seventies pioneers, Beardfish rather unexpectedly announced in 2016 that they were planning to retire. Fans of their music were pretty shocked at the time. Still, Rikard Sjöblom is not a guy who sits still when it comes to creativity. He joined British prog rock heavyweights Big Big Train and kicked off a new project, Rikard Sjöblom’s Gungfly. After touring with Big Big Train and The Flower Kings (he opened for the latter as a solo act on the tour), the man felt the time had come for a new Gungfly album.
So in the space of a single year, Rikard Sjöblom created enough material to put out as the new Gungfly album. The title “Alone Together” comes from Sjöblom’s inner world of personal confession. It’s his own reckoning with the times he’s lived through and the years he’s left behind, from early childhood to today. Along the way he’s met plenty of friends, acquaintances and people in general with whom he shared his life experiences on the road through everyday life. As Rikard Sjöblom puts it, some of them have passed away, some still walk alongside him today, and others accompanied him for just a stretch of the journey. He’s stayed connected to them forever, even though on his own path he is (each of us is) alone.
The brothers Petter and Rasmus Diamant, who handle bass and drums on the new Gungly album, are old acquaintances and musical buddies of Rikard’s. Sjöblom, who plays keyboards and bass on the album and of course delivers all the lead vocals, called them in to collaborate on “Alone Together”. From the start he had a vision of recording this album with exactly these two. It was recorded largely in the spirit of a hard-hitting rock trio, or more precisely a progressive rock trio. The fact that the album sounds fully analog is, when you run into Swedish perfectionism and sonic purism, almost redundant to mention. What’s fascinating about Rikard Sjöblom is the extraordinary artistic maturity he’s reached as a musician over the years and across a whole host of original music. While Swedish progressive rock revivalism often reaches a bit too obviously for the work of the pioneering prog icons Yes (I’m thinking of The Flower Kings, for example) and Genesis too, Sjöblom, through his years in Beardfish and especially through the broadening of horizons that his musical vision now encompasses – thanks to the experience of working with the multi-faceted prog rock sensation Big Big Train – has come out of that story victorious. In his work he’s managed to pull off a kind of choral eclecticism, which puts him on a special pedestal within the otherwise lively pulse of the Scandinavian progressive rock revivalism scene.
With both bonus tracks, “Alone Together” is an album well over an hour long, one that fascinates with its insightful ideas and high compositional flexibility. It’s also incredible that Sjöblom manages to keep up such a convincing creative charge in the relatively short gaps between releases of new original material. The very first track shows off Sjöblom’s successful leaping over the generic hurdles that can trip you up if your obsession with channeling the original is overdone. Speaking of the Scandinavian approach to this genre, “Alone Together” sounds like a pretty typical Scandinavian prog rock album. It carries that “flower” component of positive outlook and the occasional playfulness. The memories are golden and beautiful. Sjöblom underlines this especially in the song “A Treehouse in a Glade”, recalling the treehouse where they played at hiding like Indians and ambushing passersby, until one day they noticed the tree had started to dry out and they had to take the house down fast. What’s the basic difference here between the Swedish and Slovenian mentality when it comes to nature and a healthy environment? Slovenians would leave the house untouched on a dying tree. The opener Traveller is instant proof of getting past the pitfalls of genericness in revivalism. In this track alone, the second longest and one of the best on the album, Sjöblom shows off his command of different soloing styles. The first solo is frenetic and effects-drenched, while the second, which follows it, is esoteric and cerebral, owing its inspiration to Pink Floyd (Gilmour), Camel (Latimer) and Genesis (Hackett). At the same time, in this song Sjöblom proves to be an exceptionally good vocal chameleon, brilliantly varying from an approach that’s almost “feminine” to something close to shouting, and everything in between. The second track, thanks to a bit of “stumbling” and a lucid shaking-out of musical seasoning, owes its inspiration to the achievements of Gentle Giant. It’s the album’s most playful track, called Happy Somewhere In Between. Clavinet, Moog, Hammond, electric piano. These are just a few of the sonic pastels created by Sjöblom, a lover of Nord keyboards, on “Alone Together” too. On The Shoulders of Giants carries the memory of teenage years, when the records of the giants of rock adventurism were spinning, especially with its opening dedication to Frank Zappa. A phenomenal track, and probably the peak of the album, serving up the biggest helping of compositional variety and looseness.
The album holds the listener tight and doesn’t bore for a second, in the sense that the motifs and structures never happen to resemble one another, that is, never end up too thin on ideas. The element of a dynamic weave of varied moods, with the typically progressive effect of unexpected turns, is thus fully realized. The trio sounds exceptionally tight. With strikingly effective chemistry, in everything they take on, they’re warmed up in the studio to just the right working temperature the whole way through, which brings highly expressive vividness and brilliant technical execution.
“Alone Together” is an excellent album and a textbook example of Scandinavian progressive rock expressionism. You can certainly hear traces of mild jazzy structures in there too. But what draws you in and grabs you most is really the eclecticism that Sjöblom and his companions manage to develop. Whether “Alone Together” is better or worse than the two Gungfly predecessors is strictly up to you. The point is that it’s simply yet another superb achievement from Rikard Sjöblom, proof of the exceptional artistic maturity and insight of his own brand of musical adventurism, which is nowhere near done evolving.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Tracklist:
1. Traveler
2. Happy Somewhere In Between
3. Clean As A Whistle
4. Alone Together
5. From Afar
6. On The Shoulders Of Giants
7. Grove Thoughts (bonus track)
8. Shoulder Variations (bonus track)
Lineup:
Rikard Sjöblom – vocals, guitar, keyboards
Rasmus Diamant – bass
Petter Diamant – drums
