| The
Review |
You never know when a band takes almost 10 years
to follow-up a great first effort, whether or not events have
pushed the band in a good direction. Well in the case of Puppet
Show we can safely say that those intervening 9 years have
only helped their musical direction. That’s right Bay area
band Puppet Show have finally surfaced with a follow-up to
1997’s Traumatized and its the rather spectacular sounding
The Tale of Woe.***
This quintet consists of Sean Frazier (lead vocals),
Mike Grimes (keyboards, backing vocals), Chris Mack (drums),
Chris Ogburn (guitars, backing vocals), and Craig Polson (bass,
backing vocals). It’s clear from listening to The Tale of
Woe that these guys haven’t been just sitting around doing
nothing. They may have been distracted by other duties but
they’ve certainly kept up and perhaps even improved upon their
musical chops, partly as a result of putting in a number of
high profile festival performances.***
For the symphonic prog fan everything is here. Loud, soft,
fast, slow, busy, pastoral it’s here in spades and in many
cases it all shows up in each composition. We have 6 tracks
and most of them are long: two are around four-minutes then
we have one almost nine-minutes, another almost twelve-minutes
and the two longest fourteen and sixteen. So as you might
expect there is a lot going on here. The music goes from being
busy and complex to more melodic passages with only a little
dissonance thrown in. Track two, “The Seven Gentle Spirits”
has a real early Genesis feel to it not least in the musical
approach but in the vocal styles as well. It has that quirky
Gabrielesque manner written all over it. Track four entitled
“The Past has Just Begun” brings out a slightly different
feel and has many moments where the song’s melody structure
and vocal style will bring to mind the best of Echolyn. The
fifth track, the aptly titled “God’s Angry Man” shows off
the band ability to let it all hang out, very percussive,
angular and discordant. It all comes back into focus with
the beautiful, although still more than a little angular “On
Second Thought.”***
I have to emphasize here that the musicianship coming
out of these guys is first rate. Grimes’ keyboards are heavenly,
Ogburn’s guitars provide just the right punctuation and the
bass and drums add not only the rhythm but a powerful momentum
and drive to each of these pieces. The CD was produced by
the band and was mixed by Terry Brown of Rush fame. Puppet
Show’s The Tale of Woe is simply spectacular and gets my highest
recommendation.
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