Short Reviews [Jeremy - 2023 - "Bright Side of the Son"]

Even before I looked inside and realised that this time Jeremy Morris was working with old friend and drummer Dave Dietrich, I had a huge smile on my face, as the album title is very much a double pun. ‘Bright Side of the Sun’ is of course the opposite of ‘Dark Side of the Moon’, and by switching ‘Sun’ to ‘Son’ he showed that this was lyrically another of his religious releases. Just in case people didn’t get the joke there are two covers on this album, “Interstellar Overdrive” and “Obscured by Clouds”. Musically this is Jeremy spreading his wings and moving away from the power pop for which he is well-known and far more into prog with only one song under five minutes long and two more than 13. It is also an album where he shows that while he is often happy to be strumming an acoustic, he can then overlay rich work guitar over the top. I smile every time I listen to “Interstellar Overdrive”, probably my favourite Floyd song when I was a young teenager, as somehow, he has smoothed it out, brought it up to date, rocked it and grounded it in the late Sixties all at the same time, something which I never thought possible. The introduction to the next song, ”Heading To The Light”, sounds as if it is also classic Floyd, but it had synths over the top which felt far more like Hawkwind and space rock. After two minutes the song changes totally and I found myself listening to something which had a very similar riff and progression to “Brainstorm” before it moved away. I am sure this is deliberate, as later we have “Revolution #7” which is anarchic in the same way as “Revolution 9”. In many ways this album is aimed more at the prog market, especially for fans of the likes of Pink Floyd, Porcupine Tree, Steve Hackett and Hawkwind, but it is also one of his most diverse in that he is not only bringing in different influences to the norm but he also allows himself to musically go wherever he wishes as opposed to keeping strictly within one format which is how he usually works. Released in August last year, I am less than a year behind on his most recent releases, but somehow, he has still released three more since then, so I still have plenty of catching up to do. As always with his releases, definitely well worth investigating.