This time around, however, we can treat the two albums as almost separate entities, since there isn't a concept tying the two together. That means we have one record that is mostly digestible short songs, and one record that is two epics. I can deal with that.
The first record kicks off with "Do It All Again", which you might have heard as the first single. It's everything great about the group now christened NMB. The music is uplifting, the three-part harmonies glorious, and the music inventive while being anchored in wonderful melodies. It's the sort of prog that finds the right balance between being for the musician and being for the listener.
Not every decision the band made works out as well. One of the main conceits of this band, versus Neal's solo albums, is that everyone gets their turn to sing lead. As is the case in Transatlantic, not everyone should be singing lead. Neal is Neal, and Eric Gillette has a strong voice (if a bit bland), but Bill Hubauer's voice has never sat well with me. His timbre is strange, and every time he gets a section in front takes me out of the proceedings. He was responsible for writing a large chunk of this album, but I have said with each and ever NMB album that I would prefer the band to only have one singer. That hasn't changed.
On the first record, the shorter songs have an 80s feeling, a bit akin to Peter Gabriel's solo hits. There's more obvious synths, and a louder mix than usual, which play into that feeling. That louder mix, and the vocals sometimes sounding a bit strained to be heard above the fray, also leave some of the melodies not sounding as up front and immediate as most NMB albums. The songs are shorter, and you would assume more direct, yet they are less inviting than I'm used to.
There also happens to be a cover of Simon & Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Water", which puzzles me. I'm not sure why they decided to throw a cover song on the album at all, but if you remove that song, the album could have easily been condensed down to just under the eighty minutes to make it one disc. I don't think it was so vital a song we needed to expand this whole package just to include it. (The feeling I get is the album was too long to be one disc, but not long enough to be two, so the cover was included to pad things out. Padding is never the right decision.) After all, there's also no need for the three minutes of lone acoustic guitar that is "Emergence". There's eleven minutes of music that could be cut without missing anything right there.
If you're making a double album, it's imperative that every second be of such high quality I can't say what I just did in the previous paragraph. Time is valuable, and if you're asking for the one hour and forty minutes this album does, don't give me any reason to want to do anything but listen to your music. There are those two very obvious spots where my attention shifts to other things I could be doing, and that feeling only hurts how I think about the album. There has never been a double album that couldn't benefit from editing, and this isn't going to be the first.
The first of the epics on the second record tries to play around with the usual formula. They do a better job of making it sound like a cohesive whole, rather than three songs stitched together, but I'm completely thrown for a loop when the big final time around the chorus comes, and there's still five minutes left in the song. Those minutes, full of quasi-ambient guitar noodling, stretch the song out without doing much that makes it mandatory listening. That's where editing would have been a godsend, because a quarter of the song is the cool down after you've hit the emotional high. We get what we want, and then there's so much more before the song ends. I find it frustrating.
If I sound perturbed, it's because I am. "Innocence & Danger" is an album chock full of bad decisions that add up to a long and frustrating listening experience. The album is needlessly long, bloated with some filler, and self-indulgent in places that could easily have been trimmed down. Just because you have a hundred ideas doesn't mean you have to throw all of them on one album. If you cut this down to the best hour of music, it would be a fine prog album. In this form, though, I can't say it's worth the amount of time it takes to listen to everything. This isn't the best material NMB has come up with, so if you're going to invest the time in one of their long albums, I would have to point you to "The Similitude Of A Dream" well before this one. I would call it a big disappointment, but I had a feeling I wasn't going to be thrilled with yet another double album.
I was right.
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