Verite
Artist:  KBD3
Label:  Independent: Three in One Records ( www.dougbowersmusic.com)
Time:  8 Tracks / 54 mins
 
 Apart from a conga track, a guitar solo and a few backing vocals, KBD3 is Doug Bowers. Some may know him from Ad Astra, who appeared on the Christian Prog collection CPR Vol. III. It strikes me as quite similar to other keyboard-centric works by solo musicians, in that the synths are exemplary, the sound extremely well produced, but the singing is a little pallid and annoyingly drops off at the end, the lyrics are quite unadorned, and the tunes tend not to linger. This is why people form bands.
 
Tracks vary from the three minutes of “Interlude” to the fourteen of “Truth Suite,” with most hovering between six and seven minutes.
 
The blurb claims that the disc “stands solidly in the progressive rock tradition without being bombastic or unnecessarily complex. This isn’t your 70s progressive rock knock off.” I’d agree with the first part entirely, but this truly is born in the seventies. If the keyboard sounds on “New Life” are not derivative of Patrick Moraz, Rick Wakeman and Keith Emerson, then the Gibson Les Paul is a piano. 
 
This collection has its best at each end. After an anthemic intro, the opener “New Life” superimposes synthesizers, organ, an excellent funky clavinet, tidy harmonies and a '70s/'80s feel over the driving beat. The keyboards use their freedom to wander without wandering too far. At the other end the tracks that tend not to chop and change around too much. “Time for Renewal” has a sound a bit like Yes’s “Awaken;” another track that remembers the ‘80s, “Not the One,” has a poppier feel like The Cars; and the most memorable piece, “If Anybody Asks,” which suffers from a Left Behind theology, builds on a persistent, slender and slightly funky riff.
 
The disc has the same strengths and faults that characterise the genre as a whole, which are two sides of the same coin. The plusses are its range of sounds, time signatures and musical textures. However, because you can do a lot of things with prog, it doesn’t mean that bolting a load of small sections together makes an epic track. Bowers has clearly put a lot of effort into this. I wanted to like it a lot, but it could have benefitted so much from an objective producer adding a vocalist, bringing in a little more guitar, and especially chopping minutes from nearly every track – starting with the near three minutes of preaching on the suite.
 
(All proceeds will be split between Immanuel Anglican Church in Destin, Florida, and the Anglican Church of Rwanda.)
 
Derek Walker