Label: Insideout Music
Release date: 2/16/2024
Production: Steve Hackett
Album length: 44.58 min
Genre: Progressive Rock
Rating: 9.5/10
Time slips away from all of us for good, like an hourglass mercilessly emptying from top to bottom. Cult English guitar virtuoso Steve Hackett (born 1950), who’s in great shape for his age, knows this all too well. So with his new concept-driven studio album “The Circus and the Nightwhale”, he’s set off on a half-autobiographical, half-imaginary trip through time. Instead of using his own name, he christened the conceptual hero of his adventure, from childhood to the present day, Travla (a riff on the English word for traveler). That concept probably also had a hand in the stunning cover art, which is a huge step up from the rather generic, computer-doctored covers of most of Steve’s albums over the past fifteen years.
The album, on which only one track runs past six minutes, features names well known to every fan of Hackett’s music, people the guitar master has been working with for about fifteen years, plus a few special guests who show up on just one track: Steve’s brother John on flute, drummer Hugo Degenhardt, who played on most of Hackett’s nineties albums, and drummer Nick D’Virigilio (Big Big Train, ex-Spock’s Beard), who needs no special introduction for prog rock fans.
Opener “People of the Smoke”, the birth of Hackett’s alter ego Travla in postwar England, kicks off with the sounds of a period-typical steam locomotive. Before long, Steve’s distinctive guitar passages and sacred-tinged harmonies subtly cut through those ‘pre-modern’ sounds. The guitar master immediately serves up his trademark techniques, led by tapping, which you could hear on classic Genesis albums a good number of years before Eddie Van Halen popularized it. Among the symphonic arrangements, as usual, you can also catch certain influences from 19th- and 20th-century classical music.
“These Passing Clouds” is a short but juicy guitar-solo overture to the gloomy “Taking You Down”, which sounds the most like classic Genesis of anything on the album, thanks to singer Nad Sylvan, whose style of singing recalls both Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins. The young Travla heads out into the wide world, falls under the spell of ‘dark forces’ and leaves chaos in his wake as a small-time bandit and con man. On “Found and Lost”, marked by the Mediterranean melodies of Hackett’s acoustic guitar, he’s saved from moral decay by the experience of first love, which sadly turns out to be short-lived.
“Enter the Ring” is the pivotal moment of the conceptual story: the young Travla discovers the guitar, an ‘alternative dimension’ suddenly opens up to him, and his life finds real meaning. That can also be ‘translated’ as a description of Hackett’s early musical years, when he honed his chops in Canterbury Glass and Quiet World before leaving for Genesis. Fittingly, the track has an upbeat atmosphere with sacred harmonies and acoustic passages, while John’s flute delivers a spirited twist with a pinch of folk and shakes everything up nicely, before Steve’s signature soloing storms in for the grand finale.
As a gifted young guitarist, Travla eventually runs into unexpected success, which marks the relatively punchy “Get Me Out” (a nod to the Genesis standard “Get ‘em Out By Friday”). The pressures of fame keep growing and the fans’ expectations get to be too much. His private life suffers as a result. For Steve, a rather introverted young man who ‘hid’ behind big glasses and a beard, the ever-bigger, unexpected success of Genesis really did start to feel suffocating. No surprise, then, that in 1975, while still a member of the band, he recorded his solo debut “The Age of Acolyte”, which is still considered one of his best works.
On the romantic “Ghost Moon and the Living Love”, the longest track on the album, the mood flips completely from gloomy to almost heavenly, thanks to major scales, optimistic passages and ethereal female backing vocals. In this period Travla/Steve met the Brazilian painter and his first wife Kim Poor, who seemed like the love of his life but in the end it just ‘didn’t work out’, ending in an ugly divorce and copyright lawsuits (settled in 2010). Her ‘legacy’ lives on in the covers of nearly all of Hackett’s solo albums up to 2007 and in the instrumental “Kim”. On the punchy, dark “Circo Inferno”, flamenco sounds and a wild tenor sax solo take the lead, together symbolizing the moment in Travla/Steve’s life when he decided to leave Genesis.
He makes the break for a solo career on the short but punchy instrumental “Breakout”, which is worth spinning for anyone who doesn’t realize that Mr. Hackett had a huge influence not only on prog rock virtuosos but also on plenty of hard rock and metal guitar masters. “All at Sea”, another short, brooding instrumental, portrays the risky start of a solo musician’s path, riddled with trials. On the dramatic “Into the Nightwhale”, Steve, a big fan of Italian music and literature, borrowed inspiration straight from Collodi’s Pinocchio: his alter ego suddenly finds himself in the belly of a giant night whale (the orca on the cover), but with the help of unexpected friends he manages to defeat all the vampires and demons lurking in dark corners. One of the most interesting moments on the album is, true to its message, full of unexpected ambient contrasts and time shifts.
The upbeat “Wherever You Are”, which carries the well-worn and these days overly commercialized, yet always relevant message that ‘love conquers all’, depicts Travla/Steve’s ‘self-realization’: he meets his second wife and manager Jo Lehmann, thrives as a musical creator and finally frees himself from the shackles and scheming of the music industry. Here Steve shows off his always admirable guitar technique one last time on the album, including in an epic guitar solo, while the eclectic skills of his musical collaborators also come into their own. The instrumental “White Dove” is a romantic, almost hypnotic closer on guitar, utterly unique to Mr. Hackett.
With “The Circus and the Nightwhale”, an epic autobiographical journey that owes some of its inspiration to both Homer and Collodi, the legendary guitar great has created another conceptual treat for all lovers of top-notch symphonic prog rock. As is typical of quite a few of Steve’s past albums, all the tracks on it are roughly equal in weight and none really stands out, so for maximum effect it needs to be heard as a whole, that is, from start to finish and in the right order. Almost every new studio effort of his for the past twenty-five years or so lands among the contenders for prog rock album of the year, and, unsurprisingly, this time is no different.
Author: Peter ‘Dr. ProgRock’ Podbrežnik
Tracklist:
1. People of the Smoke (4:51)
2. These Passing Clouds (1:34)
3. Taking You Down (4:17)
4. Found and Lost (1:50)
5. Enter the Ring (3:52)
6. Get Me Out (4:15)
7. Ghost Moon and Living Love (6:43)
8. Circo Inferno (2:30)
9. Breakout (1:37)
10. All at Sea (1:46)
11. Into the Nightwhale (4:06)
12. Wherever You Are (4:18)
13. White Dove (3:13)
Lineup:
Steve Hackett – electric, acoustic and 12-string guitars, mandolin, harmonica, percussion, bass guitar, vocals, backing vocals
Contributing and guest musicians:
Roger King – keyboards, programming, orchestral arrangements
Amanda Lehmann – vocals on tracks 1, 5, 7, 8, and 12
Nad Sylvan – vocals and guitar on track 3
Benedict Fenner – keyboards on tracks 7 and 9
Rob Townsend – tenor saxophone and whistle on tracks 3 and 8
John Hackett – flute on track 5
Malik Mansurov – tar on track 8
Jonas Reingold – bass guitar on tracks 1, 3, 6, and 12
Craig Blundell – drums on tracks 3, 5, 7, and 12
Hugo Degenhardt – drums on track 9
Nick D’Virgilio – drums on track 11
Daniel Rawsie – voice on track 8
Jorge Araujo – voice on track 8
