FM - Black Noise

B: Sandra's turn, 3 to pick from, who next? 

S: alright, you're doing such a good job of leading the witness, i'll play along and choose FM. 

B: you're too kind, feast your eyes upon Black Noise. 

S: Ew, what is that? Is that an arm coming out of his stomach? Is that supposed to be water or ice? Oh gawd, what's going on in the lower left hand corner? It's giving me the trypophobes. 

E: it looks like one of those weird Vaporwave videos, but clearly this is from like the dawn of computer graphics. 

B: no argument from me. Alls i can do is sweeten the deal. The back proudly proclaims this a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation production, and there's an electric violin/glockenspiel player named Nash the Slash. With titles like Phasors on Stun, Dialing for Dharma, and Slaughter in Robot Village, I'm going all in and calling this spacy proggy weird electronic studio experimentation, somewhere in here there's an alternate dimension contender for the Dr. Who theme, possibly giving Mike Oldfield a run for his money. I of course could be wrong, but the two albums left are so obviously going to be awesome that i can afford to lose this round. 

Printed lyrics on the inner sleeve? Nice. What have we got? Blast off into space. More space. Everybody fleeing this planet for another one, but we'll all die long before our children's childeren's children get there (Moody Blues reference? I think that's an affirmative). Ready or not, make it so. 

Oh yeah, this is stellar. It's actually much less weird than i expected. Super melodic and straight up peppy. Much more Argent/Camel/Ponty than EL&P or Kansas, and nowhere near as sleepy as Moody Blues or Yes or Genesis. There's a heaping tablespoon of Disco in the recipe, but it by no means throws off the dish. It even squeaked into Rolling Stone's Top 50 Prog albums. Don't let the cover scare you away, this is fantastic.