Band: Puppet Show

CD Title: “The Tale of Woe”

Label: ProgRock Records

Label Website: www.progrockrecords.com

Release Date: 2007

You never know when a band takes almost 10 years to follow-up a great first effort, whether or not events have pushed the band in a good direction. Well in the case of Puppet Show we can safely say that those intervening 9 years have only helped their musical direction. That’s right Bay area band Puppet Show have finally surfaced with a follow-up to 1997’s Traumatized and its the rather spectacular sounding The Tale of Woe.

This quintet consists of Sean Frazier (lead vocals), Mike Grimes (keyboards, backing vocals), Chris Mack (drums), Chris Ogburn (guitars, backing vocals), and Craig Polson (bass, backing vocals). It’s clear from listening to The Tale of Woe that these guys haven’t been just sitting around doing nothing. They may have been distracted by other duties but they’ve certainly kept up and perhaps even improved upon their musical chops, partly as a result of putting in a number of high profile festival performances.

For the symphonic prog fan everything is here. Loud, soft, fast, slow, busy, pastoral it’s here in spades and in many cases it all shows up in each composition. We have 6 tracks and most of them are long: two are around four-minutes then we have one almost nine-minutes, another almost twelve-minutes and the two longest fourteen and sixteen. So as you might expect there is a lot going on here. The music goes from being busy and complex to more melodic passages with only a little dissonance thrown in. Track two, “The Seven Gentle Spirits” has a real early Genesis feel to it not least in the musical approach but in the vocal styles as well. It has that quirky Gabrielesque manner written all over it. Track four entitled “The Past has Just Begun” brings out a slightly different feel and has many moments where the song’s melody structure and vocal style will bring to mind the best of Echolyn. The fifth track, the aptly titled “God’s Angry Man” shows off the band ability to let it all hang out, very percussive, angular and discordant. It all comes back into focus with the beautiful, although still more than a little angular “On Second Thought.”

I have to emphasize here that the musicianship coming out of these guys is first rate. Grimes’ keyboards are heavenly, Ogburn’s guitars provide just the right punctuation and the bass and drums add not only the rhythm but a powerful momentum and drive to each of these pieces. The CD was produced by the band and was mixed by Terry Brown of Rush fame. Puppet Show’s The Tale of Woe is simply spectacular and gets my highest recommendation.