Review Summary: Big Big Train wobbles slightly after a run of excellent albums, but maintain their poise with some well-crafted prog.
It took Big Big Train a while to set themselves apart from other progressive rock acts, but they slowly developed their clean and symphonically rich sound, eventually giving us 2013’s English Electric Part 2 – an album of gorgeously neo-Romantic orchestration and engaging, sentimental stories. It felt like the pinnacle of Big Big Train’s individuality. Folklore is then the band’s where-do-we-go-from-here album, and the direction they choose is somewhat non-committal.
The main problem with Folklore can be confined almost entirely to it’s opening title track. Storytelling has become one of Big Big Train’s strengths but in this track the laws of good storytelling are stomped into the ground and smothered with redundancies such as ‘let us begin where it all began’ and clichés like ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’, made all the worse by the fact that they fill seven minutes telling us that they tell stories, ironically, without telling any stories. The shallow lyrics are complemented by enthusiastic drumming and trite strings culminating in the worst of prog bombast. The pseudo-folk motifs used in this track feel like less of a change of direction for the band, as one might expect from the song and album’s name (for this kind of arrangement doesn’t return save for one track), but rather a quick slap of gloss used in order to try and convince audiences that they’re trying something new.
What the song ‘Folklore’ does, however, is highlight how Big Big Train don’t necessarily need to force their sound to evolve to remain interesting. The rest of Folklore doesn’t depart heavily from the band’s established sound, yet still manages to make some surprising turns and sound consistently pleasant throughout its runtime. The stretch from ‘London Plane’ to ‘The Transit of Venus Across the Sun’ morphs between soothing classic prog and quaint classical textures, and the sweepingly pastoral, 12 minute ‘Brooklands’ adds to Big Big Train’s established rural soundscape as much as it takes cues from it. When they stick to their strength of delivering lavish and intricate arrangements, the end result is always an enjoyable listen.
However, there are tracks that succeed in bringing something fresh to Big Big Train’s discography. ‘Winkie’, an eight-and-a-half-minute story with a pigeon protagonist gets everything right that the title track gets wrong – a story with a plot and a concept that’s plausible, whimsical, and historically interesting, accompanied by an instrumental bounce and fervour that keeps things fast-paced and varied.
Despite some criticisms, Folklore is far from a failure, simply an album that wobbles in trying to differentiate itself. Yet, there’s a familiarity to a lot of the tracks on Folklore that feel comforting rather than lazy or uninspired. It’s Big Big Train’s knack for making soothingly rich and complex pieces that make Folklore a worthwhile album for anyone interested in classic or symphonic progressive rock.
