Pallas – The Sentinel (1984) (*****)

What’s to like?

Seminal album from a band considered one of the front runners during the second wave of progressive rock that appeared in the early eighties.

The low down

Nineteen Eighty Four might have been the year it was all going downhill for George Orwell, but it was actually a pretty good year for prog.

The big guns like Yes and Rush were pushing the boundaries with their 9.0.1.2.5. and Grace Under Pressure albums respectively, while on a smaller scale, the UK’s prog revival scene was continuing to push closer to mainstream awareness. Major record labels cottoned on to the fact that bands like Marillion were potential moneyspinners, and suddenly, every major label wanted one of these “neo-progressive” bands on their roster!

Marillion might have been the first of these bands to land a major record deal, but Aberdeen-based Pallas weren’t far behind. In fact, Pallas were almost the frontrunners instead, having given Marillion an early leg-up with a support slot on a Scottish tour, boosting their fanbase and setting them on the road to sell-out gigs at London’s Marquee club and a major contract with EMI.

Pallas went through the same graduation process during 1983 but negotiations with Polydor fell through at the last hurdle – and in a bizarre twist of fate it was EMI came to the rescue. The band received the good news as they went onstage to perform a showcase set at the famous Reading Festival, and it must have fired them up no end. I’ve got a cassette recording of the set, broadcast by BBC Radio, and it’s terrific stuff.

As soon as the gig was over Pallas then set off to Atlanta to record The Sentinel album with Eddie Offord, the man who’d produced such iconic prog albums as ELP’s Tarkus and  Yes’ Close To The Edge.

The band had previously released an earlier album, an LP pressing of their self-financed live cassette Arrive Alive, but clearly expectations were high for The Sentinel as their first ‘proper’ album. The band had been writing and demoing the material for quite a while, often trying it out on their live audiences beforehand. I was lucky enough to see the band in May 1993 when they premiered demo versions of Cut And Run, Arc Of Infinity and Rise And Fall, and even at that early stage the new songs sounded promising. (I surreptitiously recorded that gig on a portable cassette player and still have that tape!).

So when the finished result was released in Spring 1984 there was a real buzz in Aberdeen’s rock community – the local boys had done good.

But when I unwrapped the LP and spun it up on the turntable, I came away disappointed. I had been eagerly looking forward to hearing the epic Atlantis Suite – a group of songs based around a tale of the lost city of Atlantis rising out of the sea to save a world on the brink of nuclear peril. Alas, the LP only included two of these tracks – Rise And Fall and Atlantis.

The band’s ambition to release a double album had been quickly nixed by the record label, so pragmatic decisions had to be made about which tracks would make the final cut of the album. The remaining tracks would be delegated to B-sides on the 12 inch singles to promote the album, and these would be self-produced by the band on their return home.

But there were other problems to contend with. The band and the record label were not happy with Offord’s final mix. According to the band, Offord ended up mixing the album in a hurry because he’d been offered a more lucrative project by another, more successful band. On a first listen, I quite liked the mix on the LP; it was decidedly lush and symphonic, but it had lost some of harder, heavier tones of the band’s live sound. This became more apparent when you compared Offord’s mix with the tracks self-produced by the band for the B-sides.

I always felt that this line-up sounded like a cross between the mellotron symphonics and Taurus bass pedals of early Genesis and the driving prog-metal of Rush. The fact that bassist Graeme Murray’s signature instrument was the same Rickenbacker 4001 used by Geddy Lee can’t just have been a coincidence.

Nevertheless, The Sentinel became one of my favourite albums and is recognised as one of the defining neo-prog albums from that early eighties period. The gatefold sleeve artwork (and the free poster!) by Patrick Woodroffe was gorgeous and perfectly matched the themes behind the lyrics. It probably helped that I’d seen the songs performed live beforehand, because Pallas also borrowed Genesis’ flair for theatricality, and singer Euan Lowson would don costumes for each song, helping to set the scene for the lyrics. However, sometimes things didn’t quite go to plan.

When the band opened their May 1983 show with Cut And Run, with its theme of state-sponsored assassination, Lowson chose to don a radio-microphone and sing his lyrics from within the audience. He discreetly disguised himself, to play on the fear that the assassin could be right next to you in the crowd. Unfortunately, he blended in so well that the crowd didn’t recognise him and refused to let him push in front to get onto the stage!

The Sentinel tour saw the band graduate from small clubs to theatre venues, with an impressive stage show to match the scale of the music. (You can enjoy a scan of the tour programme here.) But muted record label support resulted in half empty halls. (There were rumours circulating at the time that Marillion had pressured EMI to delay releasing Pallas’ album because they wanted the full promotion team behind their second album Fugazi, which came out a few weeks earlier….)

The Sentinel album was pretty well-received at the time, but it didn’t give the band the hoped-for break through, and they then suffered a setback with Lowson leaving. It wasn’t the end of the road for the band, but it did feel like the end of a golden period for me, and although the band continued to make great albums, I kept returning to The Sentinel.

However, there was always that nagging curiosity about how the album might have sounded in different circumstances. Until eight years later, when the band reissued the album on cd format.

This time around, the original six tracks were supplemented by the single B-sides, with the running order re-sequenced to better match the band’s original concept. Guitarist Niall Mathewson then gave the music a remix to balance out the different recordings and bring it closer to how the band had originally wanted the album to sound. There was no additional material, but finally, fans could enjoy the album in the way it had been envisaged back in 1984.

And that’s the version that’s worth tracking down, if you haven’t heard The Sentinel before. The band have since set up a webshop on the Bandcamp site, and have made available the original demos for the album, including a number of rarely heard songs which were side-lined in the final selection of material to be recorded. If you’re familiar with the Atlantis Suite of tracks, then you’ll find these additional demos fascinating to listen to, but in all honesty you can see why they were left off the finished album, as they tend to recycle themes and melodies already present in the established songs.

In its cd version The Sentinel feels complete, with every track earning its place, and the revised running order giving the album an ebb and flow missing from its original vinyl release. Pallas went on to make several more albums over the years, some of them very good indeed, but The Sentinel is the album which they’re most associated with, and perfectly captures that moment in the early eighties when prog rock was experiencing its indian summer revival.

[Photographs courtesy of http://www.pallasofficial.com/)