Review: Blake Hobson – The Spectaculator

Style: Eclectic Progressive Rock, Comedy Prog, Progressive Metal, Sea Shanties (Clean vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Moron Police, Devin Townsend’s Ziltoid albums, Troldhaugen, The Dear Hunter
Review by: Christopher
Country: US-NC
Release date: 1 Sept, 2022

Prog is often characterised as a pretentious genre, and while it does feature the likes of Steven Wilson—whose compositional genius is matched in scale only by his frankly impressive smugness—prog actually has a great sense of humour. Just think of Devin Townsend and his commitment to making quirky albums about a coffee-addict alien or how Cheeto’s Magazine wrote a song about a mouse and a chef locked in an eternal battle for a block of cheese. There’s a self-aware contingent of progressive musicians who are fully aware of prog’s excesses and embody a musical meta-commentary that manages to simultaneously skewer and homage both the genre’s worst pretensions and its greatest qualities.

Which brings us to Blake Hobson, a North Carolinian multi-instrumentalist who just released his sophomore effort, The Spectaculator: a concept album which follows the eponymous Spectaculator, an Irishman who sets out on a voyage across the ocean bound for Mexico, only to be pursued by an elbow-flapped creature known as The Creep, with whom his fate is entangled. It continues in the vein of such madcap maximalist artists as Cheeto’s Magazine, Troldhaugen, and Devin Townsend’s zaniest works, with the goofy goodheartedness of Moron Police’s A Boat on the Sea thrown in for good measure. Powered by a progressive rock underpinning, Hobson populates his epic concept album with zany character voices, silly accents, a variety of wild and wacky instruments, spontaneous forays into unexpected genres, and much more. There’s a surfeit of sonic silliness bursting from every second.

Musically there’s a ton to enjoy here. Hobson knows his way around a variety of instruments (guitar, bass, drums, sax, kazoo, etc) and genres (swing, folk, avant-garde, electronic, sea shanties). The guitar and synth do a significant amount of heavy-lifting, providing a canvas of complex rhythms for Hobson to paint his story upon; he takes real care with the bass, which has some lovely licks that stand high in the mix; and there’s a lot of alternate percussion: clapping, something that sounds like cabasa, xylophonic noises, even the vocals provide some percussion (specifically: intentionally awful beat-boxing). Every instrument gets a moment to shine, but Hobson is focused on the way every element contributes to the overall whole.  

However, the vocals are undoubtedly the driving force on The Spectaculator, and Hobson offers us an impressive repertoire: his ‘main’ vocal style recalls The Dear Hunter, but he offers a variety of other styles (baritone, gravelly, falsetto), and accents (Scottish, Irish, French and more), as well as silly voices for character differentiation, spoken and sung narration, and even some growls (which are more like character voices than anything that will offend the sensibilities of people who don’t like harsh vocals). Hobson’s distinct layering of vocal harmonies is one of the great joys here, and is seemingly ripped from the pages of sea shanty music theory (and from Haken) reaching its zenith in the enormous layers on “Sail on Oh Sailor”. Indeed, sea shanties and folk are close at hand throughout; a couple of the shorter tracks, “Starry Shore” and “Sail on Oh Sailor” are just straight-up shanties, and that folkish sensibility suffuses other tracks, particularly “Rite of Passage” and “The Atlantic”. 

I don’t have room to write about everything I’d like to for this album, so here’s a collection of the somewhat baffled notes I jotted down while listening to The Spectaculator, some of which may help convey the sheer depths of compositional insanity the prospective listener is in for: 

• Hoedown
• This is like prog Weird Al
• Is the North Carolinian accent similar to Australian?
• Brief fart solo and boing sound effect
• Joyously terrible Scottish accent explaining the plot with bagpipe accompaniment
• I’m willing to bet this is the only album in existence that features a rhythmic laughter/kazoo break
• Beep-ba-bo zany singing and silly riff, a handful of yodels, it’s about farts
• Scat break (not that kind of scat)
• This track opens with a nod to The Godfather theme, and closes with an homage to “The Mighty Masturbator”. I mean, why the fuck not? 
• Where has this French guy come from?
• Cool electronic noises and a hoarse man followed by sudden Oriental stuff
• Has the Kraken had a laryngectomy?
• Final song is about farts (maybe that kind of scat)

Immersive as a sea voyage and expansive as the ocean he sails upon, The Spectaculator is a spectacular journey, one that fans of zany, wonderfully composed prog should jump on right away. There’s no avoiding that this release is too long and that some of the silly voices are a little grating, but Blake Hobson has thrown everything including the kitchen sink into this work, and I couldn’t pinpoint anything I would want to cut from any of The Spectaculator’s eighty minute runtime (ok, maybe some of the narration, including the Australian accent on “Rite of Passage”) — every minute holds a new delight. Want an album that makes you say “what in the ever-living fuck is going on” in the best possible way? Look no further: The Spectaculator has you covered.

Recommended tracks: Beast of the Deep, The Atlantic, On the Run
You may also like: Toehider, Cheeto’s Magazine, Empire Bathtub, Others By No One
Final verdict: 8/10

Related links: Spotify | YouTube

Label: Independent

Blake Hobson is:
– Blake Hobson (vocals, guitars, keyboards, bass, percussion, production, mixing, zany voices, fart solos, and everything else)