Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *

There is an adage that to have done well you passed with flying colours, the overall result was about as close to perfection that you could ever hope for without a team of University lecturers raising an eyebrow in your direction and asking for a re-count on the basis that nothing could be that good. To pass with flying colours sounds good, it reads well and it puts a song in your heart so loud that it drowns the sorrow of high expectation in your own life with magnificence normally reserved for trying to please loved ones and close friends.

For Steve Morse, Mike Portoy, David Larue, Casey McPherson and Neal Morse, Flying Colours is perhaps arguably just the absolute pinnacle that collectively they will do and nothing exemplifies that more than their latest album release Second Nature, which is downright triumph of musical lyricism and instrument command.

To take five talents from their own pool of influence and place them together, in much the same way that the beauty of Mike Portnoy’s and Neal Morse’s other project Transatlantic embodies, is to be admired, to wonder just how it is achieved without breaking something precious and how does it sound just so confidently heroic whilst swaggering with justification out of the stereo. Like a humble life guard on the rocky depths of the Cornish Jurassic Coast, it goes about its business in such a way that the listener doesn’t realise just how courageous they are till it swims out to meet them and keeps them safe with tales of over aweing chemistry and endeavour.

Second Nature is an album of confident thought provoking tracks, of songs that just sit and wait for the moment to dive between the ribs and clutch gently at the soul. Whether in the cradling arms of the outstanding lead in track Open Up Your Eyes, which is 12 and half minutes of sheer inventive inquisitiveness, the wonder of The Fury of My Love, the desire held within A Place In Your World or the stunning extensive closer in the three part Cosmic Symphony, all is held up to the light, scrutinised and delved into and the conclusion is the same every time, that Second Nature is an album for all seasons, it should be for all tastes, it certainly is for all hearts.  

Second Nature is a giant of an album from five musicians who put the hero in heroic.

Ian D. Hall