Amplifier - The Octopus
- Written by Pete Harris
Merely mention the phrase ‘prog rock’ to most music fans and they’ll turn their nose up as if you’ve just unwrapped a block of ripe Stinking Bishop before them. The genre does tend to conjure connections in one’s mind; that chin scratching, real ale drinking, beardy nerd who thinks that Terry Pratchett is the funniest man on Earth. The kind of people who don’t ‘feel’ music but dissect it. Even the phrase itself ‘prog’, as in progressive, has a kind of holier-than-thou feel, as if it’s more than just your bog standard rock. It might as well be called ‘pedestal’ rock. But the ‘p’ word doesn’t have to be a dirty one. For every chin stroker band like Yes and Rush (entertaining as they are), there are more restrained, sensible proggy alternatives such as Anathema and Porcupine Tree and it’s in this camp that we find Amplifier.
Even before the play button is hit, The Octopus impresses. Three years in the making, two disks and a running time of two hours – this is an album that screams BIG. Most impressive however, is the fact that this mammoth album has been created without a single penny from a record label. Forget the prog rock tag; Amplifier are an indie band in the original, truest sense of the word.
You should never judge an album by its cover and marketing blurb, as the old saying goes but in this case, thankfully, The Octopus is equally if not more massive and impressive when you do get round to pressing play. We start with instrumental opener ‘The Runner’ which, even sans lyrics, manages to convey the album’s thematic preoccupation with the vastness of the universe. As ‘Minion’s Song’ starts, the first thing you’re struck with is how much Sel Balamir sounds EXACTLY like Feeder’s Grant Nicholas. Balamir’s delivery is a little more crisply English, a little more clean and polite but it’s pretty uncanny how close the two voices are.
Muse’s ‘Butterflies and Hurricanes’ is also a reference point here as ‘Minion’s Song’ has that same piano led, rock opera style. Elsewhere, other band’s influences creep in; the riff in ‘Interglacial Spell’ is pure Led Zeppelin, ‘Trading Dark Matter on the Stock Exchange’, possibly the least successful song on the album, sounds very Pink Floyd and ‘The Sick Rose’ has a Far East vibe reminiscent of Tool’s more introspective moments. I make all these comparisons not to suggest that Amplifier are rip offs, nor that they wear their influences too readily on their sleeves, I mention these bands as The Octopus seems to somehow encompass them all, as if it’s an encyclopaedic entry into the library of prog rock.
As with pretty much every double album ever created, it’s a bit of a slog to get through it all in a single sitting and disk one is unevenly loaded with the album’s better tracks (‘Interglacial Spell’, ‘The Wave’, ‘Planet of Insects’). However, The Octopus is one of the most meticulously crafted albums I’ve heard in a long time. You really can hear how everything’s been honed to perfection over the past three years. The band’s self titled debut from 2004 will no doubt seem somewhat flat after listening to this behemoth and if that’s not progressive, I’m not sure what is.