The
album, Necessary Wasted Time, has
eight tracks with a total running time of around 50 minutes, and track 1 “The
Man Out Of Time” is the shortest at 3:28 minutes and the final track on the
album, the title track, “Necessary Wasted Time,” is the longest, travelling on
to 8:47 minutes.
This
album has graced my pc many times in the last week, and as with many others, my
favorite tracks have changed from time to time, but at the time of writing,
they are “The Man Out Of Time,” “Stop Talking” and “Necessary Wasted Time,”
which has also been featured on my radio show.
The
opening track to the album, Necessary
Wasted Time, is “The Man Out Of Time” (3:28) and has a superb acoustic
guitar passage to start, then is joined by what could be a sitar riff and
keyboards all packed into the stunning opening 30 seconds. The track continues
in the same vein with the keyboards becoming more prominent until a change of
tempo around 1:25 minutes, producing a chunkier sound before merging back into
the opening theme, with background vocalizations above the music. At around
3:00 minutes, we are back into the chunkier sounding area again, which takes
the track out. There is a little spoken message at the end the track. This is a
“belter” of an opening track, which is all but an instrumental, and paves the
way for a magnificent array of melodic progressive music.
Track
2, “Stop Talking” (5:14) again has an acoustic start with an excellent little
melody and keyboards building in the background. The vocals, when they
initially appear, sound as if they are going through a vocoder which then
dissolves into an acoustic passage with “proper” vocals, which are both
powerful and clear. Synths provide a string sound in the background and the
guitarist (F or P or both?) shows how well he can handle his instrument. A
beautiful flowing passage carries the track along with slight tempo changes and
a return to the “vocoder” vocals in the background around the 3:30 minute mark.
The sounds being produced by the musicians on this track are fantastic and a
short electric guitar motif appears late in the track before the acoustic
ending.
The
final track on the album is the title track, “Necessary Wasted Time” (8:48) and
it starts with a simple acoustic intro to the vocals and the keyboards and also
has a slower tempo than the two tracks previously mentioned. The catchy sound
is very quick to settle into your brain and you find yourself being immersed in
the music rapidly. Small “hook” riffs appear from time to time and the synths
become much more predominant from about 2:15 minutes which maintains the
overall superb feel to the track. At about the 3:30 minute mark a change in tempo
provides a bountiful and wonderful acoustic passage which sits so well in the
mix. An electric guitar riff appears at around 4:45 minutes which is extremely
melodic and floats above the powerful drum/bass foundations. There is a short
radio style narration before the song fades to return with a stunning (and
short) piano melody, before the acoustic guitar and keyboards pick up the
initial melody again and the sound builds up with washes of keys and another
electric guitar work-out as the song passes the 8:00 minute mark and makes its
way to the finale.
As
a debut album, this is superb. The sound that they produce at times recalls
bands like Black Sabbath, Uriah Heep and Led Zeppelin, not in the heaviness
stakes, but I always found that these bands could produce amazingly stunning
acoustic guitar based songs. The Custodian has that same characteristic sound
within this album. As with the Flicker album recently reviewed, there is also
the feeling that there is never any rush to proceedings and the songs travel at
the pace they should. There is a terrific balance between the acoustic and
electric areas of the band and the result is this stunning debut album.
Necessary Wasted Time is
another one of those albums that should carry a “One To Buy” sticker and should
definitely be a purchase for all discerning fans of melodic progressive rock.
5/5 Stars
Key
Tracks: The Man Out Of Time, Stop Talking, Necessary Wasted Time
Jim “The Ancient One” Lawson-MuzikReviews.com Staff
February 23, 2013
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