I was slightly disappointed with Mike Keneally’s initial release of 2004: Dog seemed to be lacking some cohesive element in the music. Where it worked, it worked great, but Dog was just too unbalanced by some out-of-place avant-garde-ish pieces that didn’t really fit on such an otherwise rockin’ album.
So when this seemingly long-in-production orchestral follow-up recording arrived on Sept. 7, 2004, I wasn’t quite sure how to react. Caution was the only thing I could feel. The Universe Will Provide would be the moment that revealed if Mike Keneally had slipped quietly over that dark side a peak of creativity often has, or if he had somehow managed to take everything to the next level.
The latter, amazingly, was the verdict on this collaboration with the Metropole Orkest.
The Universe Will Provide somehow managed to combine all of Keneally’s previous excesses, from the wildly tangential and angular avant-garde excursions of Nonkertompf to the enveloping warmth of Wooden Smoke, and the result was a stunning, beautiful exploration of what I can only imagine are the soundtracks to a kid’s most vivid dreams – all of it without a single word. Forget that snippets of this could be found in the weakness of Dog‘s “This Tastes Like a Hotel.” That kind of confused, meaningless meandering was nowhere to be found in any of this album’s 13 pieces.
[SOMETHING ELSE! INTERVIEW: Mike Keneally talks with us about the lingering influences of Frank Zappa and XTC, and his magical introduction to prog through Emerson Lake and Palmer’s ‘Tarkus.’ ]
Most impressive of all, however, was that this managed to escape the embarrassment of being a “rocker with orchestra” vanity piece. If anything, The Universe Will Provide was the album that Mike Keneally has been saving all his creativity to make.
Set free from Frank Zappa’s band a few years before his unfortunate death, Keneally had been flirting around the fringes of this kind of work, but it clearly took a while for his skills and personality to mature to the point where something like The Universe Will Provide is created purely out of a need and not an ego-soothing exercise in excess.
It couldn’t have happened before then and it couldn’t have happened later. Then it happened, perfectly.
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