Style: Progressive rock (clean vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Genesis, Big Big Train, Spock’s Beard, Dream Theater
Country: United States
Release date: 27 February 2026

---

I was getting worried about everybody’s favorite Christian prog rock grandpa; after all, it had been almost four months since he released anything at the time of L.I.F.T.’s release.¹ Love Neal Morse or hate him, he’s been a staple of modern prog for over three decades now… and has released thirty-eight prog rock-adjacent albums in the past thirty-one years,² ranging from his collaborative work with prog rock supergroup Transatlantic to his Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young worship project D’Virgilio, Morse, & Jennings to redefining neo-prog itself with Spock’s Beard in 1995. But of all his post-2002 projects (when he became a born-again Christian and penned basically every song’s lyrics since then to reflect his faith), perhaps none is as consistently strong as his work with The Neal Morse Band. Now releasing their fifth album under this moniker, do Morse & Co. make the painfully long wait worth it with L.I.F.T.?

The aptly titled “Beginning” is my favorite track on the album—and shows a growth mindset from Morse who has, in his discography, seventeen tracks with the word “overture” in the title,³ along with several others including words like “introduction,” “preface,” or “prologue.” Why is a largely instrumental introductory track my favorite on the album? Even though I’ve grown quite fond of Morse’s throaty, emotive, and imperfect singing style over the past decade of listening to his music, his lyrics are painful—leaving the instrumental sections as L.I.F.T.’s saving grace.

Across the album, Morse and his harmonizing pals consistently induce full-bodied cringe. The call-and-response choruses of “Fully Alive”—a track which isn’t good enough for the painfully superfluous “Fully Alive, Pt. 2” to exist—are banal. The two songs from a child’s point of view about having divorced parents (“I Still Belong,” “The Great Withdrawal”) make me nauseously recoil, especially when I hear a sexagenerian singing, “Mommy and Daddy, they don’t seem alright / And I feel afraid of the monsters at night / But I still / I still belong.” And, of course, there’s Morse’s obsession with shoving Christ down the listener’s gullet. You always know it’s coming, but on some recent records, Morse backs off a bit more than he does here; pop off about your faith all you want, king, but as a prog rock critic, the themes are done to death, and the lyrics here aren’t even poetic. Another good example of the crappy lyricism is found in “Reaching,” which begins with the a cappella line: “Oh, Father / Of the earth and the sky / I feel like I’ve wasted my life / I don’t even know why.” The lame rhyme really hammers home that the concept of the album—which ostensibly “follows the journey of a person reconnecting with the world around them, after having lost themselves”—is really about Christianity… again. I should give credit to Morse that “Reaching” also has one of Christian rock’s most brilliant lyrics: “Like a true amphibian lives in water and the land / You learn to go under, learn to come up / Two worlds, hand in hand.” The real Christian ought to be a frog. Don’t even get me started on the Christian pop rock AOR ballad “Shame About My Shame.”

Praise God that L.I.F.T. has plenty of standout moments. Mike Portnoy’s disappointing return to Dream Theater reinforces my belief that his work with Morse is among the best in his oeuvre, never overplaying while injecting that signature Portnoy flair. Yet another longtime collaborator of Morse, Eric Gillette, wields the guitar well across this album, as per usual—his tone is scrumptiously reminiscent of Petrucci’s. Gillette demonstrates that he can just as easily shred with the best of them (the four-minute solo section of “Hurt People”) as he can play with feel (“Gravity’s Grip”). NMB’s pianist Bill Hubauer also lays down plenty of excellent solos, putting his Berklee pedigree to good use, with his standout moment being the intricate performance that fully makes the track “Carry You Again.” To keep all of these moving pieces separate requires excellent production, which L.I.F.T. certainly has. The record feels warm and expansive, with a whole host of rock instruments, strings, gospel choirs, four harmonizing vocalists, and synth layers all balanced. NMB sound professional and tight as always, and I’m impressed by how smooth L.I.F.T. sounds while navigating so many moving parts. 

If this were my first time hearing Neal Morse, I’d likely be praising the songwriting for being varied and dynamic. It’s not my first time hearing him, though, and the songwriting this time around is a bit trite. I like the more metal-y tone that “Gravity’s Grip” takes at the beginning, reminding me of Morse’s solo album Sola Scriptura, but I also feel like he’s done the exact same introduction in a song before. He knows how to write cheesy emotional climaxes better than anybody, yet the ones on this album are predictable as can be. Sure, the gospel choirs in the final minutes of “The Great Withdrawal” are musically interesting for prog rock, but at this point, their inclusion just makes me roll my eyes a bit—although not nearly as much as their inclusion in “Shame About My Shame.” The worst offender by far, though, is the epic⁴ finale, “Love All Along,” which spends several minutes doing nothing except flimsy worship music before suddenly trying to do the whole “I’ve found God, let’s do an extended overly melodic, painfully euphoric prog rock gospel bit” for the second half. 

L.I.F.T. exudes an undeniably top-tier synergy among its five members, which should come as no surprise after a decade of collaboration But for a big Neal Morse fan—and even if you’ve just heard a couple of his better albums with Transatlantic or NMB—L.I.F.T. comes off as  generic and overly religious. For the latter part, I don’t really understand why Morse can’t get all his hackneyed praise lyrics out in his straight up worship albums—he just released one a few months ago, so maybe he could have explored something more multi-dimensional in his lyrics here. But at the end of the day, L.I.F.T. is a Neal Morse album, and you know what you’re getting. Sadly, there comes a time when you review enough albums of a prolific artist that you’ve run out of things to say without becoming a broken record, and I think I’ve now reached that point with Neal Morse. Until he spends more than a handful of months on a project, I could write a review for a new NMB album in my sleep. When it comes to songwriting and lyricism, Morse & Co. are in dire need of a come-to-Jesus moment.

---

Recommended tracks: Beginning, Hurt People, Contemplation
You may also like: Pattern-Seeking Animals, Jacob Roberge, The Twenty Committee, Transatlantic, Mandoki Soulmates, Southern Empire, Moon Safari, Cosmic Cathedral
Final verdict: {}/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram

Label: InsideOut Music

The Neal Morse Band is:
– Neal Morse (vocals, keyboards, guitar)
– Mike Portnoy (drums, vocals)
– Randy George (bass)
– Bill Hubauer (organ, piano, synths, vocals)
– Eric Gillette (lead & rhythm guitar, vocals)

1. That was a Christian singer/songwriter album on Halloween; it’s been an entire eleven months since he released anything interesting to a prog fan. ↩︎
2. He also has fifteen contemporary folk and/or Christian pop rock albums in that same span. ↩︎
3. Yes, I counted. Two with Spock’s Beard; three apiece with Transatlantic and with NMB; and nine as Neal Morse. ↩︎
4. It’s only eleven minutes or so, which hardly qualifies as epic in Morse’s discog full of thirty-minute monsters, but it is this album’s epic. ↩︎