The Pineapple Thief – Magnolia

Magnolia is the tenth album from The Pineapple Thief.  For a band that started 15 years ago that’s a pretty consistent and impressive rate of work – after all so many bands take two or three years between albums whereas The Pineapple Thief average a new album every 18 months.  When you think that the band tour after a release, and need time to write and then record an album they certainly can’t be described as lazy.

Okay, so it’s a prog album, so some of you are probably expecting a handful of tracks with at least a couple of ridiculously long ones, but in fact you’d be wrong.  Instead you get a dozen tracks with the longest being just over 5 minutes long, so the songs are all actually fairly short by Prog standards.  The songs are at the rock end of the Prog spectrum – by that I mean it’s not the sort of bizarre complex sounds that some hardcore Prog fans love, instead it’s music that will appeal to most rock fans as this really does have a good heavy rock sound at it’s core.  Of course there are plenty of elements to keep Prog fans happy too, but for me it’s that rock core that is the key to having a really accessible sound that really deserves to see the band playing much bigger venues than the ones they currently play.

An excellent album that I have no hesitation in recommending.

Track listing:

1. Simple As That
2. Alone at Sea
3. Don’t Tell Me
4. Magnolia
5. Seasons Past
6. Coming Home
7. The One You Left to Die
8. Breathe
9. From Me
10. Sense of Fear
11. A Loneliness
12. Bond