This two album set is something I truly don't understand. For one thing, it sits in an uncomfortable place in Neal's catalog. There are moments where he is obviously channeling his prog side, but the majority of the album is his horribly bland idea of what constitutes rocking. Even for musical theater, this stuff is fairly lame. For another thing, as I mused about last time, I don't know what the point of re-telling the story of Joseph in musical form is. There's no one other than Neal's most die-hard fans who are ever going to choose to listen to this instead of the world-famous Broadway production of "Jospeph & The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat". This is a reboot of something that is still popular, which means it's unnecessary on every level.
I'm a fair person, and all of those concerns can get put aside if the songs are good enough. I can nit-pick issues with the Neal Morse albums I do love, but those things aren't important when the overall product is satisfying. These recent rock operas Neal has been inspired to write may mean a lot to him, but that doesn't come through on record. The stories are just re-tellings of The Bible, which is about as unoriginal as a story can get, and the music leans hard into dad-rock territory. There's nothing here that captures even a fraction of the territory "Sola Scriptura" was able to, despite being a double record with over two hours to find a few decent songs. I'll take Neal's questionable quotating about the Catholic church being a whore over the blandness of this every time.
It certainly doesn't help that with this being a concept album and a rock opera full of characters, I wasn't given lyrics or a rundown of who is supposed to be playing what part, so pretty much the entirety of the story is lost on this non-religious critic. I know that's on the label and not Neal, most likely, but it's not the first time an album with a story has asked me to transcribe the whole of the lyrics to figure out what the heck they're talking about. Nope. Not gonna happen.
Also not helping are some of Neal's production choices, like his penchant for throwing far too much echo and reverb on pretty much every vocal. On "All Hail", I think it's Eric Gilette who is singing, and his voice is buried in the mix with so many effects I can barely make out a single word he's singing. I was going to make a comparison, but I think it would be sacrilegious. "The Argument" takes a different approach, with a trademark overlapping vocal approach that obscured what each character is saying under the vocals of another. If you can't make out the f'n point, you're wasting my time, and that's my greatest pet peeve at the moment.
Let me ask a question. Why is there a 'reprise' of the overture less than halfway through this record? Are things running so hot we need a minute to cool out heels so we don't rock too hard, or has this been dragging on so long Neal knows we can't remember the main theme anymore? I know which way I'm leaning.
The question I really want to ask is why so many people who claim to be directly inspired by God wind up doing and making such lousy things. If God can do anything, why can't he find some better music to be represented by?
So yes, all of that is to say that this is yet another Neal Morse evangelical effort that has utterly failed to convert me to the cause. It was always a tall order, but I had been listening to his good records not long ago, and part of me was hoping we could go back to then. Nope. The only way that spending these two hours with Joseph sounds good is in comparison to spending the full four hours it takes to get through Neal's re-telling of "A Pilgrim's Progress".
I'm probably never doing either of them again.
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