This first album in five years by the band fronted by Virginia singer and songwriter Will Toledo is a flamboyant, grandiose concept piece, a galloping, epic, theatrical, dynamic, multifarious rock opera inspired by the likes of The Who’s Tommy, but set in a fictional Parnassus University campus, each song representing a character and perspective in the story, with names such as Chanticleer, Behemoth, and Rosa’s Lizard Brain, designed by cartoonist Cate Wurtz. The main character is named as “Beolco, a student of Parnassus University, a college founded in ages past by a famed playwright known as the Scop. Beolco is deeply fond of both the college and the Scop, believing himself to be spiritually connected or reincarnated from the playwright. He yearns for confirmation of this secret belief.” So these characters are all variously students or staff of an educational organ whose voices express their travails, and illuminate a loose narrative of life, death, and rebirth, with various references included from Shakespeare to Mozart to classical opera. Well then, get your head all around that. It’s an entertaining if mind-boggling indulgence (with added illustrated booklet and cartoon characters), and at times very much reminiscent of the breadth of acoustic ballad to rippling organs to multi-layered psychedelic rock scale of some Pete Townsend concept such as Quadrophenia, the first half of the album with more conventional length songs, decorated with rich three-part vocals harmonies, horns, and a wall of guitars, with standouts such as opener CCF (I’m Gonna Stay With You), and the fast, sprightly, proggy The Catastrophe (Good Luck With That, Man). But then it opens right out into truly huge scale of the 11-minute krautrocky build of Gethsemane (with a short accompanying film), Reality (another 11 minutes) and then the near 19-minute Planet Desperation. A whole rather strange, and brave new world to get lost in. Out on Matador Records.
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