PENDRAGON — Believe (review)

PENDRAGON — Believe album cover Album · 2005 · Non-Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
3/5 ·
Warthur
Pendragon's Believe is a transitional album, and suffers from most of the problems transitional albums tend to suffer from. The band are captured in the process of moving on from the Floydian neo-prog style which had sustained them from The World to Not of This World, and whilst it is refreshing to hear them experiment, at the same time they don't seem to have conclusively hit on a new direction, which has meant that the album took a while to grow on me.

That said, it's refreshing to see a band experimenting with their sound to this extent two decades into their career, at a point when if Pendragon had continued in the same general sound they'd had from The World to Not Of This World they could have probably reliably kept the loyalty of a faithful fanbase indefinitely.

There's a greater emphasis this time on Nick Barrett's guitar playing, and an attempt by Nick to play in more varied styles than just wailing Gilmouresque solo after wailing Gilmouresque solo, and the band cast a wide net in terms of the sounds they are working with. Sometimes they seem to be edging towards indie rock, at points you get a sort of Clannad direction going, other times things get a little folky. (It feels, in fact, like at points the band are taking on influences from their fellow Marquee veterans Solstice.)

On the whole, it's an interesting experiment and there's many pleasurable songs and sections on here, but the album's highly varied sound means that it feels less cohesive than the albums which preceded or followed it. In addition, given that Nick's lead vocals are such a big component, it's worth noting that around this time he started getting big into David Icke, and worked some of his themes into the lyrics here; it's a little subtle at points, but once you know he's on the Icke train it kind of jumps out at you. I've never considered Nick's vocals to be a strong suit of Pendragon - but it's one thing to hear an OK-but-not-great singer singing meaningless nonsense or personal love songs, another to hear them singing about weird conspiracy theories.
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