Review Summary: Greepfest for the Ages
So who is Greep? - a theatre kid who owns two copies of 'Discipline' on vinyl (one for travel, one for home) or a man who believes the seventies never ended, or at least that they never should have ended? Sometimes one member of a band starts gobbling up the whole endeavour, their influence growing release by release until they are so clearly being held back by what remains of the husk - Black Midi had become such a husk, now a discarded hermit crab shell.
Here Greep (yeah, Greep, hah, never gets old) can be as theatrical and campy as he desires (which is 'very') and gets to combine the proggy pop of 'Discipline' era Crimson with the 'none more seventies' production wash of Steely Dan (I kid you not, some of this music sounds like bastardised '70s TV Theme tunes). Nothing's holding him back (he's having such a good time he don't wanna stop at all, yeah) certainly not any feeble notion of 'good taste' or any skulking permanent bandmates (replace these with a revolving cast of 30+ session musicians thanks).
His voice and lyrics are growing in confidence together like some head over heels love affair (that might or might not involve a decapitation) while the songs themselves are now transitioning with intuitive natural grace; our hero is becoming so damn comfortable with it all he's even getting away with incorporating outright silliness in his writing like the closing segment of 'Walk Up'. Don't ever take this as a sign we're not dealing with a 'serious person' here, because standout cuts like 'Holy, Holy', 'Motorbike' and 'The Magician' are as serious as your life.
