Big Big Train

★★★★ Empire ENGLISH ELECTRIC. CD/DL/BR

A rare London live show last year by the standardbearers of new UK prog.

If progressive rock seems like ancient musical history to you – as obsolete as, say, ragtime or polka music – then the best argument that the genre still has clout is this Bournemouth-based sevenpiece. Big Big Train channel the prog ambitions of 50 years ago but mix in enough of themselves to create work that sounds vivid and fresh. Empire (as in Hackney) is a live set that also acts as a greatest hits, weighted towards their most recent studio album, Grand Tour, with its lavishly upholstered arrangements faithfully recreated by an added brass section. Applying themselves to lyrics celebrating variously Leonardo Da Vinci, space travel or bucolic old England, it is the melodic inspiration and careful design that sets Big Big Train’s music apart. Their multi-part epics – East Coast Racer, Voyager – have all the technical skill of the best prog but none of the flatulence of the worst.