The Id 2023
Disaster Movie
Per aspera ad disaster and on towards redemption: prog veterans hit the rock of ages.
This international team who made their purely remote work a point of pride have been driving their Freudian vehicle for nigh on a decade now, yet their eye-into-psyche method has never been as close to diving into one’s ego than it is here, on an album telling the story of a sailor whose recklessness sank his ship and left him stranded and whose moral compass should lead him to deliverance. That the depth of the sea and of despair are given an equal conceptual weight on “Disaster Movie” will allow the listener to read many a meaning into the record’s analogies, at the same time finally liberating THE ID from usual comparisons to GENESIS as main writer Tim Pepper’s vocals explore new melodic territories now. And such stylistic shifts suit the ensemble well.
The foursome don’t hold back the tidal wave of their feelings and build intensity from the start, opening the album with a chain of “Prelude in Dm/Overture/The Voyage” which gets the triple weave of ivories – operated by Pepper and two Peters, Rodel and Albrektsen – to form a faux orchestra to take its symphonic wonder beyond a mere prog rock experience before unfolding a delicate folk tapestry that’s underpinned with Mark Murdock’s dulcet drumming. The powerful dynamics on display may rage in “The Storm” between wordless vocals and pulsing instruments, and “Aftermath” offers a hypnotic, finely nuanced balladry only to be gradually fleshed out in synthetic cloth and shot through with an acoustic filigree of Albrektsen’s guitar, but “Tailspin” is where Tim’s voice and keyboards embrace an ’80s pop vibe, simultaneously epic and simple, and the scintillating “I Never Wanted To” floats on soaring six strings towards fresh hope.
Sure, some ruminative pieces seem to linger too long for their own good, yet there’s no better way to delve into the protagonist’s remorse and regret, so “The Spectre (A Message)” dissolves clear tunes in ever-changing passages of its arrangement, pushing organ to the fore to bolster Pepper’s soft musings and fill the funereal magnificence of “Human” which has been around for a few years until this number, recut to fit the album’s flow, eventually found its proper place in the “Disaster Movie” context. And while the bluesy riffs of “Deliverance” that feed the record’s atmosphere with drama, “Homecoming” locates catharsis in the blue sea of the not-so-grand finale of THE ID’s finest moment so far.
Sail on, lads!
****3/4
