This is getting a bit silly now. Every month or so we seem to be getting a new album produced or featuring or written or all of those things at once by ex-Yes guitarist and all-round progaholic Billy Sherwood. Essentially a vehicle for him with a coterie of ace musician pals, The Prog Collective opened their account last year with a decent enough collection of original tunes.
If nothing else, at least it brought their principal player out of the rut of making okay-but-why-bother-really tribute albums to Supertramp et al.
The follow-up features yet more special guests: Rick Wakeman, Colin Moulding, Steve Hillage and Mel Collins on the very Yes opener Are We To Believe; John Wetton and Derek Sherinian light up the ruminative, Gabrielesque What Can Be Done, and elsewhere Jordan Rudess, Chris Squire, Sonja Kristina, the late Peter Banks, Alan Parsons and even Sherwood’s recent muse William Shatner make an appearance.
This long, impressive list of star contributors and their combined critical mass is clearly the USP here rather than the tunes perhaps. That’s actually a shame here: compositionally, Epilogue is definitely a step up from the Collective’s debut.
