Unknown Flow‘s rather splendid MySpace influences list tells you an awful lot about their sound. The inclusion of Crimson, Floyd, Zappa, Tool, Rush etc puts them squarely in prog territory, something they’re not ashamed of and quite rightly so. The one influence which is probably most apparent is actually missing from their list. Deliberately or not, Dream Theatre’s shadow hangs over just about all of their epic ‘Dynamism’, although the Flow don’t quite extend to Dream Theatre’s occasional chugging metal heaviness, leaning more towards their storytelling, hard rock bent. You get a few Zappa-style abstract runs thrown in, and the vocals sit quite easily between Rush and Dream Theatre in style and performance. All good stuff.
Clocking in at some eighteen minutes in total, ‘Dynamism’ takes in a massive range of quite distinct textures and movements, and although in places it does lose focus, there’s always something around the corner to take the listener off in a different direction. The song is split into three parts for the purposes of MySpace, although the band insist it is one continuous piece in its normal form. Frankly there’s about nine distinct songs lurking in there one way or another, and by the time you’re halfway through Part II, the intro of Part I is a distant and almost entirely unrelated memory.
That’s often the difficulty with Prog; the form demands long, complex songs with many facets and implicit virtuosity, but without some means of unifying everything musically you might as well just be playing lots of songs back to back without pause. That’s the one thing the Flow suffer from on ‘Dynamism’ – it’s fine and admirable carefully piecing together and executing such a long structure, but without those unifying motifs and themes it’s just an exercise in playing for a long time. Take ‘Dogs’ or ‘Sheep’ from the Floyd’s ‘Animals’ opus and you get the picture – no matter how they develop and extend the song forms, they always return to a central theme from which it all hangs.
‘Seeing the same person again’, the second piece from the EP, is only marginally less challenging length-wise, being well over eight minutes, but it succeeds in those places where ‘Dynamism’ falls short. It’s almost a Prog version of Nirvana’s ‘quiet, loud, quiet, loud’ ethos – a gentler intro gives way to a more aggressive extended mid-section before returning to the quiet intro theme, ending with a big finish and a flourish. Of course, each section isn’t a four-bar riff repeated four times (how could it be?!) but a two minute exploration of texture and chops. However the overall shorter form means that each section is punchier, more defined and serves greater purpose in the song, giving a better feeling of development and progression throughout the piece.
It’s a mightily impressive suite of music from Unknown Flow, some great playing without over-egging the “look at me” virtuosity, but they do suffer occasionally from that eternal curse of Prog, directionlessness. It’s difficult enough to write and perform this kind of music, so I have tremendous respect for them there, but they do need to keep the focus and identity within their songs, otherwise things simply become bloated and rambling. The songs don’t come across as being long just for the sake of it, but in parts of ‘Dynamism’ there are sections which could happily be trimmed or excised entirely without any loss to the end result. I now have a perverse desire to see them perform it in its entirety onstage. When’s the next gig?