The Pineapple Thief
Tightly Unwound

The album begins softly, with a voice that caresses a few words. It’s reminiscent of the morning sun opening your eyes after a night of deep sleep. Then a melody starts, as beautiful as it is melancholic, with sweet chords and evocative lyrics; the song is called "My Debt to You", and it was curiously chosen to open the seventh album of these Englishmen, who remain practically unknown to the mass audience.

The Pineapple Thief, from Yeovil, Somerset, create electroacoustic progressive music that evokes the much more renowned Porcupine Tree, and in some sounds, vintage Radiohead. "Tightly Unwound," which could be translated as "chronically relaxed," aptly conveys the mood that permeates this album: melodic ballads alternated with midtempo songs never too edgy. As the album closes, the two most progressive-oriented tracks appear, "Different World" and "Too Much to Lose", but they are certainly not the best ones.

A peculiarity of this album, and apparently of the band itself, is the lack of compositional consistency; the best tracks on the album are at the beginning. After the aforementioned "My Debt to You", we have the first single "Shoot First" (a shake-up compared to the tempos of the rest of the tracks), the beautiful combination of chords in "Sinners", and the splendid "The Sorry State". With "My Bleeding Hand", the tones of the album are revived, but it’s almost the last burst. The remaining tracks (two of which exceed ten minutes) don't say much. Worth noting is the voice of frontman Bruce Soord, whose timbre at times is very similar to that of his colleague Matthew Bellamy of Muse.

Ultimately, this "Tightly Unwound" starts very well but loses its way in the second half. It can stir emotions as long as it remains in calm waters, on already explored sounds, but as soon as it presses the prog pedal, the results are rather predictable.

An album to have if you like progressive mixed with acoustic atmospheres.