Band: Farpoint

CD Title: “Cold Star – Quiet Star”

Label: Independent Release

Release Date: 2008

You can call it persistence or you can call it perseverance, but the fact is if you choose to be in the music business you need both of those qualities and a whole lot more. And sometimes moving forward means change. Well change is one thing that Farpoint seem to be getting familiar with. On their fourth CD release entitled Cold Star – Quiet Star the band personnel have changed again, and so has the sound. This time the symphonic or progressive aspect of their music has been taken up a notch or two.

Looking back to Farpoint’s origins back in 1997 the only members still involved are Kevin Jarvis (guitar, keyboards, mandolin, and backing vocals), Frank Tyson (bass, guitar, and backing vocals) and Rick Walker (drums). New to the band are Jennifer Meeks (flute and lead and backing vocals) and Dean Hallal (lead and backing vocals). This change seems to have defined their style a little sharper. Farpoint do have some guest musicians helping out; Joe Driggers (lead and rhythm electric guitar), Sam Sanders (electric guitar tracks 1 & 3) and Trey Franklin (upright bass on tracks 2, 7 & 8).

In the past one of Farpoint’s defining sound styles has been a kind of folky-art-rock with almost a country feel and for the most part that has been jettisoned leaving more of a straight forward progressive rock with an acoustic edge. There is still plenty of acoustic guitar to go around but the song structures tend to be more rock based. The biggest change aside from the music are the new vocalists. Both Hallal and Meeks bring a new feel to the compositions. And while the music this time around incorporates a stronger sense of experimentation and diversity their vocals lend a very pleasing tone to the new music created. There are 8 tracks on Cold Star – Quiet Star with half of them being longer, between seven and ten minutes and the others shorter. There are also three instrumentals giving the disc a feeling of more musicality. My first impressions are that the band is working harder to write music outside their usual scope or frame of reference and in that respect the music is a little more complex or unusual than they’ve ever done before; more stops and starts and dramatic changes in time and tempo. Overall there is a lot more going on whether it’s from the drumming or the arrangements or everything combined. Whether this has anything to do with Jarvis taking more of a leadership role on the writing side, I’m not sure, but five of the eight tracks were written exclusively by him.

So while Farpoint have lost that “country” flavour they’ve moved more in a direction that I find most pleasing. Their sound is still very much a melodic song-based progressive rock, with symphonic arrangements. Lot’s of acoustic and electric guitars interplay with delicate flute lines repeatedly interspersed with more energetic percussion and electric guitar solos. If you’ve put off listening to Farpoint based on what you’ve read in the past, it’s perhaps time to change that idea. Cold Star – Quiet Star shows a whole different side of Farpoint and I think it’s a solid change that will appeal to a far wider range of fans. This is by far their best yet.