When I first came across Lifesigns they were the vision of John Young on keys and vocals and engineer Steve Rispin. Aided and abetted by Nick Beggs, Frosty Beedle and various guitarists (including Steve Hackett), their first album was one of the freshest pieces I heard in 2013.
The outfit has been through a number of changes since then and the current lineup in John Young, Steve Rispin, Jon Poole (bass & vocals), Dave Bainbridge (guitars & keyboards) & Zoltán Csörsz (drums).
That earlier album was all about vision and trying to understand the complexities of the universe but this new release feels more personal, more about the impact on the self and so has a very different style but probably completely appropriate for the times we are living in.
This time around the various musicians were separated by location and by Covid & Lockdown restrictions so it became necessary for the various musical parts to be recorded apart and brought together by Rispin but that element of dislocation is, remarkably, missing and the music is formed naturally and with full integrity.
Musically this is far from the modern Prog Metal world as you could get but equally it is less surreal and multi-jointed than classic Prog. Some numbers have a jazz/fusion feel while ‘Gregarious’ could be the lost Supertramp masterpiece but every track has an identity of its own. The dynamics are muted and bring the listener deeply into the ‘songs’ but once involved it is a very difficult album to walk away from: you just want to go further with the album’s ebb and flow and I found that picking different instruments each time brought a very different listening joy to the album.
It is complex but equally it has a sense of space and grounding and, so far this year, it has been one of the most satisfying listens.
