Starfooted

If you like early, Peter Gabriel-led Genesis, chances are the debut album from San Francisco progressive-rock band Metaphor will have something on it worth slobbering over. Other than John Mabry's vocals, which are solid but don't recall Gabriel's much at all, Starfooted — the San Francisco band's debut album, and only the second release on Swiss progressive label Galileo — has all the qualities, quirks, and flourishes of Genesis circa The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. That's not at all surprising considering they began their career in 1993 as a classic-era Genesis cover band before gravitating to their own, like-minded original material a few years later. Characteristically, then, complexity is a requirement, and complexity is exactly what Metaphor provides — in their playing, in their song structures, and in their lyrics. You have to give the band credit for their chutzpah. Their pretensions, like most teenagers' hormones, are working overdrive on Starfooted. To call the album a concept album is to hugely understate the fact. Other than the lack of multiple voices, it wouldn't be a stretch to call it a rock opera of sorts. Each song is actually a part or section of the whole (and is divided up as such in the CD booklet), and each is part of a dialogue, generally between two or more individuals, with some of the characters involved being a Narrator, the Snake, Eve, the Prophet, and Christ. So Metaphor has ambition in spades (which is one reason why it is a bit disappointing that their music isn't a bit more stylistically ambitious, falling back on the normal prog-rock templates). There is a plot, but it is so hopelessly dense and buried under literary pretension that it is next to impossible to ferret out. On the music end of things, inspirations other than Genesis — Rush, Yes, Gentle Giant, Jethro Tull, and so on — are also discernible throughout. Having said all that, the playing is uniformly excellent, and quite often the band find an intriguing groove or lock into a gorgeous ensemble section that is proof of their abilities. In the end, it is their sensibilities and influences that win out though. If you close your eyes and allow the music to take you away, and forget that you are listening to San Francisco band at the beginning of the 21st century rather than a British band at the beginning of the 1970s, there is plenty to enjoy about Starfooted. Or to put it another way, if you are able to dismiss the sheer retroism of the band and its album, set aside the irony of the music industry's continued insistence on categorizing music this tried-and-true by the label "progressive," and dive guilt-free into the grandiosity of it all, Starfooted is a fine album.