Warthur Noise Floor is the 13th Spock's Beard album, and their third with Ted Leonard of Enchant serving as lead vocalist. I thought the previous two albums had been excellent; Brief Nocturnes and Dreamless Sleep had a very adventurous sound as the band threw a bit of everything at the wall (including some guest contributions by Neal Morse, paying a visit back to his old haunts to help the new frontman kick things off with a bang).

Conversely, The Oblivion Particle found them shifting their sound in a somewhat different direction from previously, perhaps in a conscious attempt to give the Ted Leonard era a distinctive sound of its own - something that felt like a fairly accessible mashup of Trick of the Tail-era Genesis and Kansas, along similar lines to Crucible and their overlooked 1990s prog classic Tall Tales, with perhaps a few more pinches of AORish-ness here and there.

Noise Floor is, in essence, The Oblivion Particle 2 in this respect, in that it largely finds the band following that same general course. How you feel about this will depend on how invested you are in prior sounds adopted by Spock's Beard. If you were very big on the epic-length compositions, Gentle Giant nods, and the occasional unexpected ingredients from genres not typically associated with prog of the Neal Morse era, or the somewhat recalibrated eclecticism of the Nick D'Virgilio era, then you may find this is a little straightforward for your case.

If, on the other hand, the idea of Spock's Beard turning their hands to fairly gentle neo-prog appeals, then you'll have fun with this one. It's interesting to see what happens when bands which could produce something much more technically complex (and the Beard have proved they have those chops several times over) instead turn their talents to something like this - working in a neo-prog/AOR format not because they have to, but because they have made a conscious decision to. In this case, I find it rather charming, and another grand success from the Ted Leonard-led incarnation of the band.

One point of interest here is that Jimmy Keegan is no longer on drums - he'd had to drop out due to other commitments prior to this. Nick D'Virgilio comes back to help, but as with Neal Morse on Brief Nocturnes and Dreamless Sleep this is strictly in a guest musician capacity, not as a full member of the band. In addition, as with The Oblivion Particle the band don't write as much of this material as you might expect - good chunks are written by Stan Ausmus and John Boegehold.

Stan and John have been assisting the band with songwriting ever since Feel Euphoria, but it feels like with The Oblivion Particle and this album the rest of the group have scaled back their songwriting contribution and let Stan, John, and Ted Leonard take the lead. It's notable that subsequent to this album, Dave Meros, Ted Leonard, and John Boegehold would reunite with Jimmy Keegan to form Pattern-Seeking Animals, a spin-off project who've been more active in terms of getting releases out than Spock's Beard.

With Pattern-Seeking Animals forming an outlet for the more melodic approach of Boegehold, will we see subsequent Spock's Beard albums shift away from this approach? Maybe, maybe not - but I for one am glad that the Beard have taken this journey into a more immediately accessible style, which they execute without embarrassing themselves or outright abandoning some of their more intricate roots - they're just a bit more artful about how they deploy those intricacies.

Warthur It was one of the biggest shocks to hit the early 2000s prog scene: no sooner had Spock's Beard released Snow, an ambitious double concept album, band leader Neal Morse (who had composed a substantial majority of their material to date - including almost all of Snow) quit. His declared reason at the time was that he wanted to focus his time on making solo work exploring his religious beliefs, and didn't think it would be right to expect the band to follow him down that particular rabbithole; as he would later allude to on the Testimony 2 concept album, a health scare involving his young daughter may well have prompted him to want to pull out of band projects altogether and stay at home more. Ambitious plans to perform Snow live were shelved, never to see fulfillment...

...until 2016, that is. After shocking the prog world by quitting all his existing band projects in 2002, Neal shocked it again in 2009 by returning to band work, reforming Transatlantic. Between that, the brand new Flying Colors project, and The Neal Morse Band (in which, despite the name, songwriting duties are shared much more evenly than on Neal's solo albums), it became evident that Neal was now comfortable with working as part of a band again, even on projects which didn't have an overt, explicitly stated Christian focus.

He'd even make appearances with Spock's Beard, joining them onstage at a festival or two and even making contributions to the Brief Nocturnes and Dreamless Sleep album, though being careful to be credited as a guest rather than a full member of the band. This was a classy move, because that album was the debut of Ted Leonard as the group's full-time frontman (after filling in for a departing Nick D'Virgilio on some live gigs), and it's clear that whilst Neal was happy to stop by to help out, he was also humble enough not to upstage the new singer right when he needed that spotlight.

Snow Live, however, represents perhaps the biggest and most significant reunion of Neal and Spock's Beard to date: a full live performance of the album, performed at Morsefest. (Morsefest is Neal's homegrown fan convention, a bit like his version of Marillion's weekend bashes - one likes to think of him chatting with his Transatlantic bandmate Pete Trewavas between takes in the studio, picking his brains about the logistics of running such things.) This consists of the full Snow epic, plus two encores - old favourite June and Falling Forever, a track previously recorded by Neal and Spock's Beard for the First Twenty Years compilation album.

Inevitably, such an undertaking involves Neal being prominently featured front and centre - a de facto reunion, even if just for this show (and a repeat in Europe a short while later). Snow was an extremely personal concept for him - it's basically him working through his feelings about quitting the band before he actually quit the band, he wrote almost all the music and lyrics, that's just inevitable.

Nonetheless, Neal and the band do a grand job of making the show less about Neal coming back and acting as frontman for one more night, and more about a celebration of the band's entire history. Far from sitting this one out, Ted Leonard is included in the show, the group doing a fine job of finding ways for him to contribute some lead performances as well as assisting with the backing vocals where it would serve the concept to do so. Likewise, Nick D'Virgilio came back for this gig, with the band using a two-drummer setup to allow him and Jimmy Keegan to play together, and he also contributes some vocals too in keeping with his role of frontman for the run of albums between Neal leaving and Ted Leonard joining.

(Having multiple vocalists on hand, in fact, turns out to be not just a bonus, but essential - after all, as with much early Spock's Beard stuff, there's some moments where they get into intricately intertwined vocals reminiscent of some of Gentle Giant's experiments in that vein; you might be able to do that solo in a studio by multi-tracking your voice, but you need a bunch of vocalists on hand to do that live!)

In other words, the album doesn't just include Neal Morse playing with Spock's Beard again - it also includes every single person who'd been an official member of Spock's Beard on a studio album up to this point. (Original bassist John Ballard isn't on it, but John was only in the band fairly briefly, departing before they recorded The Light.) The result is a performance of Snow which is somewhat warmer than the chilly title implies - and it works an absolute treat. Some credit has to be given to the delightful acoustics of the venue - it's Neal's local church, which gives the whole thing a nice, intimate sound, and on the whole I actually think the resulting performance sounds better than the rather clean, precisely-produced studio album.

The execution is absolutely spot on; despite the fact that neither Spock's Beard nor Neal's solo backing bands have performed all this material like this, they really nail it, like they've been playing this setlist regularly since Snow originally released. Or perhaps it sounds even better than that - maybe letting the material sit fallow for this long gave Neal and the group the appetite to really get their teeth into it now this wonderful opportunity had arisen. The fact that they deliberately only planned to play this show a very limited number of times, rather than doing a full Spock's Beard And Neal Morse Play Snow tour, might have also added a certain helpful frisson - nothing like knowing that you've got limited chances to get this right to focus the mind!

Of course, it'd be foolish to write off the possibility that Neal and Spock's Beard will perform this set again in future, or otherwise collaborate again - the very existence of this live album proves that all bets are off and "never say never" should be one's motto. But at the same time, if this is the last major collaboration between the two parties and it's just occasional guest appearances on a song here and there from here on out, this is a magnificent way for the Neal Morse-fronted incarnation of Spock's Beard to bow out, and does a fantastic job of providing the closure we never got back in 2002.

Warthur The second studio album of the Ted Leonard era of Spock's Beard finds the band exploring another fresh blend of prog sounds. Minion, for instance, starts out by reminding me of what might happen if Kansas ended up jamming with Jadis, with a combination of harmony vocals, sunny neo-prog guitar lines and synth - but then adds in jazzy drum fills and heavier moments to shake up that combination just as I think I've got it figured out. Much of the rest of the album is the same - there's a deeper, richer bench of influences than just the usual touchstones that retro-prog bands often go to time and time again, and the new subtlety and sophistication in how the band blend them together showcased on Brief Nocturnes and Dreamless Sleep continues to surprise.

As foundational as the Neal Morse era was for Spock's Beard, I think it only produced two absolutely top-tier classics (The Light and V), with the other albums of the era being good - often very good - but a little patchier. As for the Nick D'Virgilio era of the band - well, I think Nick was no slouch and did a fine job of stepping into the lead vocalist role under challenging circumstances. However, there's no getting around the fact that the band had to switch from a mode where Neal Morse was composing most of their material to one where they needed to all pitch in more to get those songs pieced together - and while they quickly righted the ship, none of the Nick-fronted albums quite hit the five-star tier.

This Ted Leonard era of the band, however... that's got me intrigued. Brief Nocturnes and Dreamless Sleep I thought was the band's first five-star classic since V - in fact, I sneakily think it was better than that - and I actually think this one has the edge on it, not least because Ted Leonard gets to show more personality. (Mental note: revisit the Enchant back catalogue, this Ted guy's clearly got something good going on.) The centre of gravity of the album puts me in mind of a somewhat more avant-garde take on Crucible, whose Tall Tales so deftly mashed up the approach of Trick of the Tail-era Genesis and classic Kansas back in 1997.

Warthur This is the album which inaugurated a new era for Spock's Beard, with the departure of Nick D'Virgilio leaving both the frontman's microphone and the drummer's stool vacant. With Jimmy Keegan having served as a touring drummer, that post at least was fairly easy to fill; the new lead singer would be Ted Leonard, vocalist of Enchant, who had taken on the role at some festival appearances that Nick hadn't been able to make.

But wait, who's that in the corner, offering some songwriting notes and a guest appearance here and there? Why, it's Neal Morse! Don't get too excited: Neal didn't come back to the band full-time for this one, content to swing by in a guest role to do a little songwriting on Afterthoughts and Waiting For Me, on the latter of which he provides a little guitar.

Neal had, in fact, performed with this exact line-up of Spock's Beard at the High Voltage festival in London - this being one of those times when Ted filled in - when the band brought him onstage to play The Light and June. Nonetheless, his presence is not overbearing here - he doesn't even sing, perhaps not wanting to overshadow Ted on his debut studio album as lead singer.

As it stands, the selection of Ted seems to be an inspired choice - he may be my favourite Spock's Beard vocalist to date - and the band seem to be in fine songwriting form, mingling their customary prog influences with touches of funk and soul - the sort of thing that they've always dabbled in a bit but which they'd never managed to make work to this extent before. Just listen to Submerged and tell me you can't hear just a pinch of Prince in it, particularly in how Ted Leonard handles the lyric. (I'm reminded, in particular, of the psychedelic-tinged approach Prince would take on albums like Around the World In a Day.) It's not that their past is gone - a Gentle Giant-esque bit of interwoven vocal play, a trademark of their early years, shows up on Afterthoughts, for instance - but it's now set in a new framework.

It all adds up to a fresh new sound for Spock's Beard, rather than a rehash of the Neal-era approach, which means that Neal's guest appearance is able to enhance the album without dominating it; it's an album which respects the band's past (and, via Neal's involvement, receives a certain approval from perhaps the biggest figure from their early years not still with the band) whilst at the same time pushing forward into a new future. Confidently presenting a new sound, it might well be the best put-together album the band have produced since V, even as it's sonic worlds away from that territory.

Warthur Few would have realised it at the time, but this live release ended up being a preview of things to come for Spock's Beard, as well as a celebration of their past. Jimmy Keegan had been filling in on the drums for their live shows ever since Nick D'Virgilio had taken over as lead singer following the departure of Neal Morse, though Nick was still serving behind the drum stool in the studio.

For his part, Nick was unable to make this festival appearance (or a Swedish one in the previous month) due to clashing commitments with Cirque du Soliel - which would lead to him officially leaving the band some months after this live show, when he realised that something had to give.

That decision might have been made easier by this show - because stepping into the breach was Ted Leonard of Enchant, who would go on to take the lead singer's spot in Spock's Beard full time. Thus, the Beard not only had someone to cover for Nick for these shows, but were also effectively use this as Ted's audition, testing him out both with their material and in front of the live crowd.

A further point of interested is added by the presence of Neal Morse on the last two tracks. Neal's solo band had been appearing at the same festival, with his set occupying a similar slot to Spock's Beard on the previous day, and he and the band were only too happy to take the opportunity to have a little onstage reunion. He's since had occasional appearances with the band both live and in the studio, but it's always been very clear that this has been as a "special guest" capacity rather than displacing any of the existing band members.

For a keen Spock's Beard fan, then, there's good reason to be interested in this release - but there's some caveats to bear in mind. Unfortunately, the sound on the album isn't what it could be; it clears up by the end, but On a Perfect Day sounds particularly poor. This is a by-product of the process used to record it: Concert Live's schtick is that they're able to record a live concert, burn it to CD quickly, and sell the live recording right to fans after the gig's done. This obviously means there's no real capacity to do overdubs, adjust the mix, filter out the sound of the audience, or otherwise give the recording much love. If you must have a raw recording of the gig, complete with the sort of sound issues you'll often run into in a hurried festival performance, here it is - but I wouldn't say this is especially essential unless you want a souvenir of this crucial moment in the band's history.