Headspace
I am Anonymous

I guess you can call Adam Wakeman and his merry men in the british group Headspace a supergroup considering the connections with some greats of the progressive genres. With one of the greatest singers in the genre in Damian Wilson, Lee Pomeroy the bassist with connections to this year’s greatest progressive act It Bites and there are more connections as well but namedropping is a poor way of writing so I leave that for you to look up if you care. This of course might be seen as an assurance of a great album but we have seen time and again that past glories is no guarantee for future success, especially not when being evaluated by my prying eyes and ears. And it is of course something in the progressive genre which means that it can be either very good or really boring depending on how the small things turns out. The album is the debut of Headspace and is called I Am Anonymous which is probably a title that doesn’t reflect on the band’s hopes for it, because if they end up anonymous one might consider this album a failure. Of course with these kinds of musicians in the mix there is a real risk of the album being parodic with everyone needing to show off their skills, sure Adam Wakeman denies in the press info that it is the case, they think of the benefit of the songs rather than their egos. That leaves a bit of a question mark though as musicians saying that they forego showing off to benefit the whole often seem to do that to make their showing off appear better than it is, and those who say that often show off more. I am not yet saying that such is the case with Headspace.

There is a risk risk of instrumental masturbation one might conclude judging by the press info and sure enough this album clearly has its fair share of that but to be fair to Adam Wakeman, he isn’t the one masturbating for the most part. One has to say though that they keep reasonably in check but the focus on the songs seems a bit more focused on doing long songs than really benefitting the song as a whole. Of the eight songs on this album seven is more than eight minutes long and a pair is over ten minutes and very few bands manages to pull more than maybe one of these songs off on an album, most of the songs this long also tends to have what I call very tired parts that doesn’t really do anything for the song but make it worse. This is certainly the case in all of the long songs on this album, there are parts where it gets silent before an act change in the song, some are episodic with more of random episodes than a storyline, some are just masturbating and full of themselves to an extent that it is sickening. But sure that is progressive rock/metal for you, and to be fair most part of the album is not centred around this but rather the songs even though they don’t really manage to complete a single track bar the short one.

Damian Wilson is brilliant on this album, his voice is always excellent and this is one of his best appearances so far. The production is carefully polished to the smallest detail and is excellent. I would also describe this as more progressive than for instance Dream Theater with odd time signatures, unexpected turns, crazy instrumentalism and lots of parts borrowed from said band along with bands like King Crimson, Yes, Rush and so on. And overall I would say that it is great, fantastic melodies, clever ideas and all of that but I still feel very disappointed with this album as it feels like they have wasted something absolutely amazing because they are too full of themselves.There are at least twenty minutes of shit on this album, twenty minutes that they should have cut away to make the songs shorter and better because they would be rid of this dead and pointless calm parts, or just bad parts as the heavy bit of Daddy Fucking Loves You, that song is fantastic when it is mellow and silent then it gets boring before it ends rather good. This could be said about most songs, Invasion has a long part of dull silent parts before picking up again and the same goes for Fall of America and this makes it just a typical progressive album with songs wasted just because some songwriter is too full of himself to realise that he had a work of art like Munch’s The Scream paintings but then took a jar of spray paint to add some graffiti tags to it. Now it sounds like I am being very negative to this album which I am not, it is a great album and I am only being a bit negative because it felt like there was something else there, something that would have made me go wow! Now it is a great album to listen to but one that I most likely will never return to again.

The best song is the third one called Soldier which is the only one that comes fully together as a song, the one where the story is told as a whole rather than in random episodes with empty spaces in between. In the end though I think this is a great album well worthy of the progressive fan’s attention, sure I ended up a bit disappointed because of the unfulfilled potential I thought I heard but nonetheless Headspace’s debut album is a great album with some absolutely fantastic pieces of music.