Album Review: Pattern Seeking Animals - Only Passing Through

With this being the third album from this offshoot of Spock's Beard, enough time has passed to ask ourselves what to make of those developments. The name has changed, but not much else has. Like the last couple of Spock's Beard albums, Pattern Seeking Animals have been comfortably in that style I have come to call 'dad-prog', wherein they are playing fairly sleepy rock songs that have just enough hint of prog to still fall under that category. It's a sound that just doesn't have much spark to it, and very little that captures the attention. It's as if you took a prog rock (if such a thing existed), and polished it so long trying to make it shine, you sanded off so much there is barely enough left to hold in your hand.

That's how I feel about Pattern Seeking Animals, because their first two albums were all finely played and recorded, but devoid of anything at all I could call interesting. They were definitely still seeking, because they had not yet found a source of exciting music for us to listen to.

"I Can't Stay Here Anymore" sums up much of my feelings on the album. The song starts off with an ominous intro, replete with strings that bring a sinister undertone. It's exactly the sort of thing that catches your ear, and it pulls you in, but to what? There's the rub, because once the song gets going, it's those strings that remain the only thing making that kind of impact. The vocal melodies have no hook to them at all, and by the time the song moves into the instrumental section, I've already forgotten what the chorus is supposed to have been. There are some good ideas in here, but the song they are in service of lets them down.

When Spock's Beard was at their best (with this basic incarnation), they were able to blend their traditional prog rock with some rousing melodies that balanced the intricacy and accessibility. As time has worn on, and perhaps as they focus more on pleasing their core audience, knowing no new fans will be coming along, the accessibility factor has been lessened almost on a direct slope downward with each album. On the one hand, leaning into who they are is great if you like that sound. On the other hand, playing to a niche audience guarantees you're going to stay a niche band. Even in the prog world, Pattern Seeking Animals are not generating a lot of attention. That might point toward a problem.

"Time Has A Way" is a thirteen minute track that definitely tries my patience. There's a solid payoff at the end, with a section that tries to sound triumphant, but with only one short vocal section over the first eight minutes of the song, it's far too much setup for the ending to feel satisfying. It's good, but it isn't good enough for me to feel like the song needed several minutes cut out to feel more cohesive. Such is prog, I guess.

"Rock Paper Scissors" tries to be dramatic, with a lovely violin line at the beginning, but with lyrics about the titular game, as well as 'olly olly oxen free', the story about childhood doesn't fit the tone of the song at all. It's a somber song, but written about trivialities, which is a disconnect I find hard to get past. Ted Leonard is trying to sing his heart out, but background vocals sounding like a funeral singing 'rock, paper, scissors' sounds more like a Monty Python sketch to me than a truly moving song.

The biggest irony is that the best song might just be "Much Ado", which is a song where all the lyrics are about how the song is actually about nothing. Not nothing in the sense of being meaningless, but nothing as in the concept. I get what they're going for, but I don't think it's the most effective way of going about things. For one thing, I'm not sure how many listeners will note the difference between the two meanings of the word. Some of Leonard's vocals are hard to decipher, which leaves the nuance of the commentary buried a bit. I would say if you're going to rely on wordplay like that, you have to make damn sure the listener can hear every word of it and know what you're doing.

So what we ultimately get is another album of frustrations. There is obvious talent here, and perhaps more than the first two records we get to hear that in the instrumental choices. The problem is that those details aren't the foundations of great songs, and whether it's the lyrics or the melodies letting me down, in either case I feel deflated listening to this.

I say prog is actually an incredibly easy genre, if you're a talented player, and this sort of album is where that rings true. There are nice moments, and interesting ideas, but when you don't have to write great and memorable songs to get the point across, a major skill in being a recording artist is missing. At the end of the day, no matter what style of music you're making, it all comes down to having songs people want to listen to. For all the good Pattern Seeking Animals are capable of, they don't have those songs.