STEVE HACKETT

Surrender Of Silence INSIDEOUT

Multifaceted collection Hackett describes as a “wild release of energy”.

If Steve Hackett’s last album, 2020’s acoustic Under A Mediterranean Sky, felt like going on a sunny musical holiday, an escape from the privations of lockdown, Surrender Of Silence is more like a frenetic world tour. His last rock album, 2019’s At The Edge Of Light, was a flamboyant multi-stylistic affair, but that feels positively conservative compared to this outpouring of ideas.

A brief instrumental The Obliterati opens proceedings with quicksilver guitar arpeggios, ominous drum beats and keyboard player and co-producer Roger King’s orchestral samples and arrangements. On Natalia, a Russian-flavoured song in which Hackett reworks the Dance Of The Knights from Prokofiev’s Romeo And Juliet, King comes into his own with a palette of darkly hued strings and choral arrangements that come over like a cross between Carmina Burana and the Red Army Choir.

But that does nothing to prepare for Relaxation Music For Sharks (Featuring Feeding Frenzy), which begins with ambient drones until the string section starts chugging and the rhythm section of Jonas Reingold on bass and Nick D’Virgilio on drums kicks in. They accelerate so rapidly it’s possible to almost feel the g-force, while Hackett – whose playing is dazzling throughout – shreds for all he’s worth.

Hackett is much travelled and has absorbed musical styles like a sponge. On Wingbeats we land in Africa and he sings of lions roaring and eagles soaring, like a sort of prog Lion King. We’re then taken on a trip down the Silk Road of antiquity on

Shanghai To Samarkand with its courtly eastern poise and airy flute melodies. Nothing here stays in one mood for long and the musicians soon adopt the leviathan tread of Zeppelin’s

Kashmir before all shifts again to eastern string glissandi, hand drums and fleet-fingered acoustic guitar.

Devil’s Cathedral – with Craig Blundell on drums and the only track to feature vocalist Nad Sylvan – sounds like the soundtrack to a Dennis Wheatley horror yarn, with sinister church organ lines pitched somewhere between the rigour of Bach and the dissonant crunch of Messiaen, orchestral melodrama, and metallic riffing Opeth style.

No one could accuse Hackett of playing safe and rehashing old ideas here, but at times like this Surrender Of Silence feels a tad kitsch and completely over the top. Rather than developing themes, he dives from one style to another in a way that makes it difficult to discern his music’s emotional core. But at the very least it’s terrifically entertaining, like an action movie where the listener is on the edge of their seat, never knowing what’s going to happen in the next frame.

NO ONE COULD ACCUSE HACKETT OF REHASHING OLD IDEAS HERE.