By: Stuart Benjamin
Yuka & Chronoship | facebook |
I have to say from the off that this record fair blew me away. Hailing from Japan, Yuka & Chronoship are virtuoso keyboardist / vocalist / composer Yuka Funakoshi and (presumably making up the Chronoship) Shun Taguchi on bass ‘n’ vocals, Takashi Miyazawa on guitars, and Ikko Tanaka thumping them drums. Without much previous exposure to them, I found Yuka & Chronoship to be a fantastically proficient and imaginative band, Yuka’s presence is all over this record and brings a refreshing upbeat personality to the album. As a composer and arranger, she’s certainly a talent to watch. The record sounds great though with influences drawing on classic old school prog of the likes of Yes, Gentle Giant, Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, through to modern prog purveyors such as Steve Wilson, Tim Bowness, and Porcupine Tree, without being in thrall to any them.
The 3rd Planetary Chronicles is a progressive rock album that takes as its theme the entirety of human technological development on this planet you humans call…Earth. It’s a hugely ambitious concept, and in a 60-minute record, some highly selective choices have to be made – the ascent of humankind, Copernican theory, steam power, powered air-flight, radio waves all feature as does a look towards a cybotic future. It’s an album that’s a celebration of all humanity, rather than bogged down – as many prog records are – in bleak dystopia of various kinds. It’s gloriously and unashamedly positive about humanity and the human race – not simply mankind, and looks towards a hopeful future, rather than a hopeless one.
As is often the case with prog, many of the songs are awkwardly named – why prog bands feel the need to do this I don’t know – but each one is a self-contained world, an intricate and multilayered thing of complete joy. Topping and tailing the record, and at various points in between, are little vignettes called ‘Birth of the Earth’, the purpose of which is firstly practical – to bookend the various historical periods which the album covers, but secondly to remind us that for all our amazing technological advancement we are, all of us, standing on a most ancient piece of rock floating through space, which changes and alters at its own glacial pace. It’s something of a counterpoint to the rapid technological change that has come with a hundred thousand or so years of human development.
That the last one is called ‘Embryonic Planet’ suggests we’re only at the beginning of the story in 2015 – which I suppose we are. It’s an idea that’s also picked up in the track ‘Galileo I – And Yet It Moves (E Pur Si Muove)’, which is overtly set in the court of the Inquisition that convicted Galileo for his theory that the Earth moved around the sun, and not vice-versa. History proved Galileo right of course, but that’s another aspect of the record that is deftly teased out – that we can rise above dogmatic thought.
But even though there are all these high-minded ideas floating about the record, it doesn’t get cluttered, it doesn’t get weighed down by the concept. It’s mostly instrumental tracks allow the ideas to form in your own mind and, as light and breezy as this album is, it gives those ideas and concepts room to breath. Only one song ‘Age of Steam – I. Pastoral Garden’ has actual lyrics, which saves you the trouble of pouring over sleeve notes and words to look for meaning in every track. It’s rather a good song too, and as it happens, very pastoral. The human voice isn’t totally absent however as various ethereal harmonies punctate any number of tracks, without forming words. It’s rather lovely.
Which leads us to the musicianship. It’s not something you can ignore, and even if you were to dismiss this record as prog-lite, you must at least be prepared to acknowledge that the playing here is second-to-none. Yuka’s keyboards drive the whole thing forward – yes, at times they do rather take over – but it’s such a glorious sound. Proggy it may be, but there’s also a healthy smattering of post-rock and math-rock touches here that keep the whole enterprise interesting and surprising. Whether it’s from the primal thudding drums on ‘Stone Age’, the beat of the early human tribes, of societies just beginning to form to the treated guitar that runs through the record like strata through rock formations. ‘E = c?m’ is a blistering track, as is ‘Wright Flyer 1903’ which – cliche alert – soars through the air much like the Wright brothers themselves.
Galileo, the Wright Brothers, Marconi, and others referenced by this record are certainly trailblazers. I think also, we can extend the metaphor to cover the role of Yuka herself – too often is prog seen as a male dominated genre, the contribution of women to prog-rock has often been invisible, unnoticed and unsung. As a band-leader and creator of this quite remarkable record I think she’s more than proved that she can produce, what I think, is my favourite prog-release of the year.
Don’t just take my word for it, just get it.
