KAPREKAR’S CONSTANT

Depth Of Field TALKING ELEPHANT Prog grows up, using horrible histories as a launch pad.

Areader’s letter last issue raised an important point expressing concern over the longevity of ‘new’ prog unless it moved beyond mere replication of key influences; a valid point that desperately needed assuaging. Enter the well-timed latest album from London-based prog collective Kaprekar’s Constant, pressing the right buttons as they pursue their manifesto of examining man-made and natural disasters buried in time, wartime tragedy, vanishing lifestyles and arcane lost London.

FLOYDIAN DRAMA, TULLLIKE JIGGERY AND THE POWER OF JACKSON.

Remarkably, it’s only the second album by the loose line-up founded in 2016 by Al Nicholson and Nick Jefferson, following March 2017’s Fate Outsmarts Desire with an epic monster that sounds like they’ve been playing for decades. Their determinedly-floating line-up is hotwired by former Van der Graaf sax titan/one man brass section David Jackson joining producer-keyboardist Mike Westergaard, singers Bill

Jefferson and Dorie Jackson, Caravan drummer Mark Walker, narrator Paul Gunn and Tull’s Ian Anderson on one track.

Following the first album’s Hallsands – about a Devon village swept into the sea – Nicholson and Jefferson start with Rosherville Part One, named after the abandoned 19th century Kent coast pleasure gardens, poleaxed after a collision between a paddle-steamer and colossal iron collier claimed over 600, many drowning in raw sewage infesting the Thames. After a densely cinematic introduction, the track’s 10-minute first part moves through Floydian guitar drama, Tull-like jiggery, funereal piano themes and the awesome power of Jackson in thermonuclear Pawn Hearts mode (Part Two begins with watery sounds and, like other tracks, includes archival field recordings and Gunn’s spoken word).

Then it’s to Holywell Street, the narrow Victorian street running parallel to The Strand that was London’s grimy porn centre before being wiped off the map. Ghost Planes concerns shot down aircraft in World War Two, The Nightwatchman that vanishing strain of outside diehard and 23-minute epic White Star’s Sunrise the Britannic, Titanic’s also “unsinkable” sister steamship, commissioned as a hospital vessel in 1915 before perishing after striking a mine, killing 30. With drama enhanced by survivors’ accounts, the music rises again to the occasion; magnificently dynamic with Jackson on fire.

This album is the sound of prog upping its original game; providing food for thought, grabbing buried emotions and, in Kaprekar’s Constant’s case, heightening social injustices by recounting overlooked past tragedies to show nothing has changed. Truly sounding like nobody else, there should be enough justice to hail it an epoch-making masterpiece.