Professor Tip Top’s new album Tomorrow Is Delayed allows all prog lovers to “take a little trip back with Father Tiresias,” to a time when a really nice album flowed with complex tunes, emotive vocals, sublime guitar work, melodic keyboards, and a kitchen sink ethos that painted music with impressionistic and dynamic paintbrush (and very colorful!) Norwegian rock band strokes.
The first song, “Erebus,” is almost an overture for the rest of the album, with its funky Deep Purple “Maybe I’m a Leo” pulse, determined bass and percussion (thank you, Stein Hoegseth and Charles Wise), the melodic guitar and moog of songwriter (and sort of main guy!) Sam Fossbakk, and Sonja Otto’s lead vocal – which in a wonderful way, echoes the deep passion of Dagmar Krause, in her quite lovely Slapp Happy voice, in contrast to her Art Bears’ “Rats and Monkeys” rather dissonant singing.
By the way, Sam Fossbakk’s guitar work, which is absolutely beautiful throughout Tomorrow Is Delayed, certainly recalls the melodic playing of Camel’s Andy Latimer and Wishbone Ash’s Andy Powell. The woven guitar work of “Under Crystal Stars” could be a backing track from Argus: It’s (almost) a religious quest!
Two Professor Tip Top songs push into extended prog territory. The seven-minute-plus “Inside the Mirror” gets moody with keyboard textures. Sonja Otto’s dramatic voice and Sam Fossbakk’s atmospheric guitar playing touches a slow psych blues heaven with David Gilmour passion. And the organ-fueled (thank you, Sonja!) and guitar-warmed “The Ghost Within” conjures the blessed tapestry of the before-mentioned Camel, during their early albums – without, of course, Andy’s flute! Still, from one prog lover to another, Professor Tip Top’s Tomorrow Is Delayed is an excellent album which leaves its own footstep on the dark side of any distant moon.
In contrast, the title track, “Tomorrow Is Delayed” bites a bit with a complex guitar blast, perhaps worthy of Robert Fripp, that rides with the tough vocals and, for a moment, delves into a quietude, until the song erupts into a big Hammond organ and percussion finale. Anyone for tennis with early Uriah Heep? That’s a big compliment.
But the truly big song, “Beneath the Silence,” indeed, marks “all of the above” on any progressive rock lover’s song checklist. This one spins around a distant planet that sends patient radio waves with a pretty decent melody all over the universe: It’s lovely, and then it’s lovely over and over again. The song is an intricately cobwebbed tune that ends with a long slow descent re-entry from that cosmic cruise around the deep night stars.
“Objet petit a” follows with a spacey impressionism. A moog (!) swizzles, while Sonja Otto’s vocals wobble, until a strident guitar (with an excellent solo), once again, lands the tune on rock ‘n’ roll terra firma.
Of course, as my friend Kilda Defunt often says, “The universe will never end with a bang or a whisper, but rather, with a really nice – and deeply melodic – very acoustic song.” And my Kilda’s comment certainly finds its faith in the album-closing “Earth,” which is a simple guitar and voice parachute that floats into the final grooves of this album. Professor Tip Top departs with a love letter to humanity’s ground-zero parent mother, as it simply prays: “music is everywhere” and “your soil is my home.”
Really nice prog winds breeze their way through these tunes. So do “take a little trip back” into the world of Professor Tip Top – a place where Tomorrow Is Delayed and there’s a warm musical cocoon, a musical haven with songs brimmed with emotion, melody, and (the always-appreciated) very cool guitar playing.
https://professortiptop.bandcamp.com/album/tomorrow-is-delayed?from=embed
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