Highly recommended if you like Walter Becker, Martin Springett, Ottmar Liebert, California Guitar Trio, Siiilk, and Caravan. Limited Edition CD-RP only 100 manufactured, includes an autographed 24-page full-color book with illustrations for each song as well as lyrics
Includes unlimited streaming of The Blue Door
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
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Streaming + Download
Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
Limited Edition CD-RP only 100 manufactured, includes an autographed 24 page full color book with illustritations for each song as well as lyrics
THE BLUE DOOR album review by Steve Bennett / Playwright Screenwriter
Two Time Bafta Award Winner
As metaphors go, it’s hard to avoid the myriad possibilities on offer in a title like ‘The Blue Door’. As if ‘door’, itself, wasn’t enough – this one’s blue! The good news is, if you want to go searching for meaning and connection in these ten deeply involved and involving tracks, you’ll find it. If you’d rather just sit back and sink into an intricate and beautifully woven tapestry of tunes, come right on in. Oops…see what I mean about that door metaphor?
What’s immediately striking about this latest outing is that your green-fingered Head Gardener, Martin Springett (still mining his fruitful fascination for the oblique melodic subtleties of Satie, Stravinsky, et al) has craftily opted for a timeless and trusted managerial tactic. Fans of the recent and hugely impressive Time Trilogy will note the consistent team selection of an exceptionally accomplished band of top musicians once again given the freedom to express themselves at the highest level. Coaches will tell you ninety percent of being successful is about picking the right players. Theatre directors will say the same about casting and, by that same token, Springett is definitely, once again, onto a winner.
There’s a clear sense of development, here, from the themes and ambitious musical stylings so intriguingly explored in The Time Trilogy. This time out, though, it feels like Springett has consciously opted for a more ‘single-concept’ through-line in terms of both lyrics and melody. The opening, ‘Overture’ (fittingly enough), reminds us of exactly where we left off last time out, with its slinky, desert camp-fire percussion and naggingly persuasive guitar motif reminiscent of the thrilling Saharan explorations of Robert Plant and Justin Adams. We’re thus lead into ‘Two Houses’ and the hint of an emerging storyline via an elusive, hovering melody that finally lands us on a path back - ‘Going North’ - towards those loping, camel caravan rhythms so ably driven by Kevin Laliberte’s rippling nylon-string guitar. The song’s lyric-line, meanwhile, drops us, counter-intuitively, into a darkly claustrophobic, back seat journey along a British motorway, all sweeping headlights and the looming threat of too-close traffic. It’s a contradiction that takes the mundane and makes it seem exotic. Soon the narrator’s growing alienation is turning the fading, repeated mantra of ‘anyone really’ – question? statement? cry for help? - into a conflict between faint hope and quiet resignation.
From there, the jagged, restless probing of the title track pushes the eponymous metaphor both ways. This door leads back into memory but also outward to the unknown with all its triumph-and-disaster potential. It’s a deliberately unsettling vibe that coalesces into a wordless, ice-cool, bluesy passage before suddenly bursting forth in a brief but blissful pastorale that does, finally, offer a glimpse of the sunlit uplands of ‘The Path Not Taken’. It’s possibly the album’s most powerful melodic statement; a surging, Steve Hackett-style, tune-metal stomper that sashays and struts like an off-duty Robocop.
The yearning melancholy of ‘Winter Snow’ sees Drew Birston’s slippery fretless bass emerging once more as a dazzling primary colour on Springett’s musical canvas with – something of a recurring sensation, here - the extended coda leaving us with enough splashes of sunlight to warm the previously frozen landscape. Indeed, ‘Mirage’ continues to notch the temperature up and up - right back to desert heat-haze proportions - with the return of those familiar, insistent Phrygian dominant and melodic minor nylon-string runs that can’t help but speak (at least to these timid Anglo-Saxon sensibilities) of wild, possibly even forbidden, Mediterranean passions.
‘The Turning of the Glass’ cools the fever-dream a touch with the soaring melodic promise that, whatever else is out there, music can, indeed, “make a better world”. The sentiment would seem naïve, in isolation, but the album has worked to reach this moment. There’s a sense of resolution, here. We may, after all, find a measure of peace behind that blue door. The tune’s slow-blossoming, ultimately uplifting refrain emerges almost unnoticed until it’s suddenly washing over all the doubts of the earlier part of the journey like a musical sigh; a welcome glimpse of the safe road home.
Nonetheless, ‘I Dream U’ has us looking back towards that still ‘undiscovered country’ (the past? the heart?) where those unrelenting, seductive Andalucian rhythms are determined to sweep us up again into their restless dance of uncertainty. Springett’s vocal line takes on a breathless, spiralling urgency alongside Wayne Kozak’s thrilling soprano sax stabs, spinning and swirling us into the final track, ‘Long-Tailed Flight’ - the most overtly Tarifa-styled statement on the album - that sways and sashays with all the performative swagger of a Montmartre nightclub Danse Apache. With the whole closing argument built around Sari Alesh’s keening violin lines, this is no comforting resolution. Whichever side of the door we end up on is up to us. The tune’s shifting, probing dynamic urges us to keep moving through its nylon-strung, handclapping, irresistible surge. Even the final note leaves us suspended.
Have we arrived somewhere – or nowhere? Maybe that’s the point. Listen. You decide.
credits
released October 18, 2021
The Blue Door Sessions
MY MUSE AND I (OVERTURE)
Composed by Martin Springett
Kevin Laliberte - Drum programming - Arrangement - Final and mix and production
Drew Birston - Electric 5 string bass - Moog bass
Martin Springett - Arrangement - Electric and acoustic guitars
GOING NORTH
Composed by Martin Springett
Kevin Laliberte - Drum programming - Arrangement - Final mix and production
Drew Birston - Acoustic and electric 5 string bass
Sari Alesh - Electric violin solo
Martin Springett - Vocals - Electric and acoustic guitars
TWO HOUSES
Composed by Martin Springett
Kevin Laliberte - Keyboards - Arrangement - Final mix and production
Martin Springett - Vocals - Acoustic and electric guitars
THE BLUE DOOR
Composed by Martin Springett
Kevin Laliberte - Keyboards - Arrangement - Drum programming - Final mix and production
Martin Springett - Vocals - Bass - Electric and acoustic guitars
THE PATH NOT TAKEN
Composed by Martin Springett
Kevin Laliberte - Keyboards -Arrangement - Drum programming - Final mix and production
Martin Springett - Bass - Acoustic and electric guitars
WINTER SNOW
Composed by Martin Springett
Kevin Laliberte - Arrangement - Drum programming - Final mix and production
Drew Birston - Fretless bass
Martin Springett - Vocals - Acoustic and electric guitars
MIRAGE
Composed by Martin Springett
Kevin Laliberte - Arrangement - Drum programming - Final mix and production
Drew Birston - Fretless bass
Martin Springett - Acoustic guitars
THE TURNING OF THE GLASS
Music by Martin Springett / Lyrics by Terry Findlay
Kevin Laliberte - Arrangement - Drum programming - Final mix and production
Drew Birston - Fretless electric and acoustic bass
Martin Springett - Vocals - Electric and acoustic guitars
I DREAM U
Composed by Martin Springett
Kevin Laliberte - Arrangement - Drum programming - Final mix and production
Wayne Kozak - Saxophones - Soprano sax solo
Martin Springett - Vocals - Bass - Acoustic and electric guitars
LONG TAILED FLIGHT
Composed by Martin Springett
Kevin Laliberte - Arrangement - Drum programming - Final mix and production
Drew Birston - Acoustic bass
Sari Alesh - Acoustic violin
Martin Springett - Acoustic guitars
Format: CD & Digital
Catalog Number: MRRCD 22207
Label: Melodic Revolution Records
THE GARDENING CLUB is a progressive rock band infused with plenty of other styles and influences, founded by Martin
Springett, the band has released three albums, the Gardening Club, the Riddle, and Boy On A Bike. Based in Toronto Ontario and Victoria BC....more
Wow! What a great album. Lots of great songs and great production. Some impressive guests as well like Jon Davison and Billy Sherwood of Yes. This album should be in every prog rock lovers collection. marcusalmightygemineye
Chugging, organ-laden motorik-psych from Spanish group Melange with lockstep rhythms and kaleidoscopic vocal harmonies. Bandcamp New & Notable Nov 13, 2017
This was truly an extraordinary passage. From beginning to end, "Passage To The Forest Of Mysterious & Birds" is a celebration of Karfagen's legacy and a sweet spoonful of nostalgia for it's fans. The first half embodying both aspects best, reviving familiar themes and ideas as phoenixes to fly along the new flock. The second being a more than worthy expansion and observation of the classic "Birds Of Passage", re-freshed, re-mused, re-fused. My endless respect to Antony's passion for his work. The John