Review Summary: Aerie Faerie Nonsense.
It is 2015, and veteran progressive music collective The Enid have officially been around for forty-one years, consisting of mainly young musicians surrounding founding member Robert John Godfrey and longtime drummer/percussionist Dave Storey. At this point in the band’s lengthy history, Godfrey was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2013, and has been on a continuous search for a permanent successor to take his place in The Enid; the ongoing court battle against former label Inner Sanctum and founder Gerald Palmer is in its final stages; and as of now, the band is readying themselves for a string of live previews of their newest album,
Dust, the third and final album of what is a planned trilogy of concept albums. The ambitions of The Enid, amidst the financial and health woes within the Enid camp, are at an all-time high. Recently coming off a pricy tour for this exact album, the band is at work to ensure that
Dust is perfected.
The Bridge is an album that is not all too common from The Enid, but is set to be the first in another triad of albums from the band, this set focusing on the performance development of newer members of the band – vocalist Joe Payne, guitarist Jason Ducker, and percussionist Dominic Tofield. After the success of 2012’s
Invicta, Payne and Godfrey wished to explore the classical elements of the band’s music in further detail, which led to the creation of this proposed trilogy.
The Bridge has Payne at the forefront alongside Godfrey. The orchestral arrangements and vocals on the album are accompanied by Ducker's symphonic guitar textures and multi-instrumentalist/vocalist Max Read's choral arrangements. Interestingly enough, there are no percussional instruments to be found here.
“Bridging the gap between the arts and entertainment; the shallow and the deep; the brash and the sensitive. A place where history meets the future. A plea for open mindedness, tolerance and natural justice at a time when the world is sleep walking into the unknowable.” – Robert John Godfrey
Surely enough,
The Bridge bridges the gaps between the past and the future generations of the band. A project by the members of The Enid to ensure the future of the band is left safe and secure,
The Bridge merits some sort of recognition in the case that it strives for originality, freshness, and well, progression. However, its greatest flaw is the fact that it relies far too much on the band’s back catalogue and rehashes old compositions while merely re-arranging them for the new generation. As a matter of fact,
The Bridge uses the same formula as the
Arise and Shine trilogy from a few years earlier – using the tried and true method of putting vocals over old tunes and retitling them, a long withstanding tradition of Godfrey’s that’s gone back several decades. Old habits truly die hard. This formula has been used on several of the band’s “experimental” albums in which also focused on the newer line-ups , so this idea of reusing old ideas isn’t exactly a bad idea, but is a very lazy and uninspired way of making music when it comes down to it. This habit is at its worst on
The Bridge, featuring nine songs, three original songs, the other six existing in The Enid’s back catalogue.
The results of this mish-mash of music are quite varied, and for the most part,
very disappointing. While Payne’s vocal skill is stunning, his songwriting craft is ever-improving, yet has a long way to go with such nonsense like
”Bad Men”, a track that tries its hardest to be politically relevant to British politics, yet falls flat with lyrics like
“They wait for the chance to be sneaky and creepy/They’re all freaking mad” and
“Bad men are clever and cunning/We won’t know you’re gone until you’re already in their bellies/Bad men are starving, but laughing, collecting our bonds”. Another nagging issue with Payne is that his delivery can be greatly melodramatic on tracks where the original composition was majestic and powerful, such as on the track
”Wings” (originally
”La Rage” from 1988’s
The Seed and The Sower) – which odd enough, is the highlight of the album, and one of the better written songs that Payne has undertook yet. Yet, the root of the problems of
The Bridge is the absolute lack of percussion, which could’ve added a vital driving force to the classically-influenced pet project that Payne and Godfrey have whipped up. As a result of this unusual absence, a great deal of the music just feels weightless and “aerie-faerie”, to say the least.
A total far cry from the usual material of The Enid,
The Bridge is an admirable experiment by Joe Payne and Robert Godfrey, yet falls victim to easily soluble flaws such as rehashing old compositions and the tired method of putting lyrics over them in an attempt to bring them up-to-date with the excuse that it will help hone Payne’s songwriting craft. This also leads to a very important question:
Just when did the idea of having vocals on every single song become a thing? It comes across to me as lazy, uninspired, and just purely stagnant – something I ever so rarely associate with a band like The Enid. While merely a showcase for vocalist Joe Payne as well as a means of honing his abilities as a musician,
The Bridge comes across as a half-baked, scatterbrained, and greatly unfocused stop-gap filler for a much bigger and better album in the making.
