Blue Élan 2026
Sharper than steel and sweet as the razor’s edge: Los Angeles followers of the Witchwood dreamers polish gems from influential English ensemble.
Signals In Autumn
In a parallel world, Sonja Kristina never left STRAWBS to front CURVED AIR, and such a turn of events won’t be too difficult to imagine after listening to the first offering from SIGNAL MERIDIAN, a project created by Blue Élan Records mastermind Kirk Pasich, who corralled four chanteuses to cover quite a few of Dave Cousins’s collective’s classics as prog fare. The late David would scoff at the idea of his combo belonging to this genre, the band’s 2014 offering “Prognostic” making fun of the idiom, yet the songs Cousins used to write were so locked into his highly individual delivery – with a certain workingman anthem a rare exception – that interpreting the group’s cache of tunes seemed almost impossible. Art-rock is as good a common denominator for “Signals In Autumn”: it gave the artists on Pasich’s label a chance to stretch their creative muscle and wrapped the resulting album in a concept.
The American players, led by ivories master Sasha Smith, celebrate the British musicians’ songwriting more than original performances here, with Chas Cronk and Dave Lambert pieces prominently featured as well. And though indicating in the poster-booklet a platter which each of these numbers came from may look a little didactic, the fruits of the overseas fans’ dedication feel fantastic. The producers didn’t pick what lent itself readily to their selected style; their approach was aimed at bringing obscure tracks to light to let the deeper cuts from the ’70s shine afresh and transforming less-forgotten lore into potential hits. Still, the appearance of “Lay Down” – that Bernie Barlow’s vocals and Adam Gimenez’s guitars render infectious – can’t fail to surprise the listener even after the choice of “Cut Like A Diamond” as a fairly bombastic opener, thanks to the spaced-out synthesizer passages and robust six-string riffs, and the dusting off of “Little Sleepy” to rock the joint.
Contrasting these are “Don’t Try To Change Me” that Holly Palmer’s sultry harmonies take towards pop elegance, and the piano-driven “Carry Me Home” that Vanessa Bryan’s pipes infuse with soulfulness before providing “I Don’t Want To Talk About It” with spiritual uplift and “The Last Resort” with a middle-of-the-road shimmer. It’s as unexpected as the blistering heaviosity demonstrated on “Heartbreaker,” where Jordan West’s drums reign supreme – the same West whose rhythmic nous and passionate, nuanced singing elevate the tempo shifts and inventive arrangement of the “Autumn” suite to celestial grandeur. Picking “Who Knows Where The Time Goes” as a wondrous finale to emphasize the album’s feminine angle might be logical, but this is, perhaps, a misstep, the project’s only good-natured blunder, because the Sandy Denny perennial always stayed with the lady no matter which ensemble she worked with, having just a tangential link to STRAWBS.
“Signals In Autumn” is a nigh-perfect homage to the underestimated collective – and the beginning of a four-part series set to expose the brilliance of similar outliers who brought a new kind of sound into our lives. A valiant effort.
*****
