Just so you’re aware, if you hear any splashing sounds during this review it’s the sound of my doggy paddling. Yep I’m far out of my depth, deep in the topographical oceans I merely paddled in as a kid, heading for the land of Prog with not even a passing black metal riff to cling to. The coastguard has been alerted…

Having said that, on first listen after the usual compass points of straw had been clutched at and discarded (Yes, Asia) I found myself unaccountably dragging something from my memory as I thought “…this reminds me just a little of It Bites somehow. ” Lo! A little more reading and it transpires that the main guy here is John Mitchell of It Bites. He handles (almost) all singing / songwriting here, and all the instruments apart from the drums (beautifully handled by Craig Blundell), so not an entirely lonely robot.

It’s prog so is there an all-encompassing concept? Of course there bloody is. In fact this is the second part of a projected trilogy, the strange voyage of an astronaut and here our wayward voyager apparently wakes from cryo-sleep in a wood, surrounded by people wearing animal heads (it’s probably just Abbath, or Fenriz on a hike…). Very 1970s sci-fi head flick.

The thing is you all too easily forget how incredibly accomplished a lot of prog musicians are until forced back into listening to it. No, this isn’t my preferred genre having been irredeemably traumatised by Yes and ELP and bloody Camel as a teenager with prog fanatics for friends. But on the other hand I am a VDGG fan, loved early Marillion and Twelfth Night and even had time for Pallas and King Crimson. And I find Lonely Robot quite unexpectedly and thoroughly sublime.

With the exception of the song ‘Sigma’, a beautiful and haunting earworm of a song with a rising, rousing chorus and an emotion that seeks out your heart directly, this is an album that is best reviewed as a whole for me. It is obviously a journey, even if an interrupted one, and as well as musings on the various states of existence or absence thereof, there is to me a clear backwards look on life, things gone, lessons that perhaps were not learned as well as they should have been. Reverie and regret? Within these beautiful, flowing passages of music with not a metal riff in sight there is a melancholy and yet still an almost childlike wonder which is rare to preserve. Guitars and bass bubble and scamper freely before the melody, pulled by the fine vocals, simply slipstreams into clear air turbulence and soaring thermals. This is a truly wonderful album with poise, delicacy and strength when needed. The arrangements are complex but unfussy, the need to weave layers never dragging down the song, rather allowing the needs of the song to shape and fold it. It is the best of this kind of music; immediate but with such depths that you can fall into it and just float there in the bright, sunlit current.

Yes there is a strain of sadness here, bittersweet regret, but it is all with your face turned firmly to the sun. Acceptance of whatever the journey will bring perhaps. Kind of like poor little Dewey at the end of Silent Running.

Ah, it’s just powerful, wonderful and extraordinarily accomplished. Even if you’re not a prog head, please give a Lonely Robot a home. A beautiful surprise.

(9/10 Gizmo)

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