No Hill For A Climber (Gatefold Cover, 140 Gram Black Vinyl) [Import] (2 Lp's)

The new album by Neal Morse & The Resonance - entitled No Hill For A Climber from a resonant line in Barbara Kingsolver's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Demon Copperhead - has its roots at the end of 2023, as Morse explains: "I started thinking about what I was going to do in 2024, and my wife suggested that I should think about doing something with the amazingly talented younger guys that we have here locally - like Chris Riley, Andre Madatian and Philip Martin. I knew just how good they were from playing with them at our Christmas concerts and other events." One of the benefits - Morse soon realised - of working with local young talent was a sense of newness and immediacy: "These guys brought a lot to the table. There is a freshness that comes from working with new and younger people. There are some musical ideas they brought that would NEVER have occurred to me: there is lots of new stuff here." Nevertheless, faithful to any Neal Morse prog album, No Hill For A Climber features two long epics (the 28 minute No Hill For A Climber and Eternity In Your Eyes, which clocks in at 22 minutes) as well as three shorter songs. Indeed, for all the above reasons, Morse believes that the whole album is quite unique: "If I was going to compare its structure to an album I've done in the past, it might be along the lines of a Bridge Across Forever or Spock's Beard's V; it's not that it sounds at all like those albums, it's just structurally similar. It has voices and playing styles and soundscapes that many people will have never heard before! Everyone you work with changes you a little bit, so even I sound a little different on this one, but I hope that everyone will love it!"