Issue 2025-015
Tribe3 — Life Amongst Strangers
I first became aware of Tribe3 at Winter's End Festival in Chepstow in April 2024, where they immediately captured my attention with the gripping and vivid theatricality and originality of their performance. At that juncture, Jonathan Kinsey, who started off as their drummer before being demoted to vocals (as he self-deprecatingly puts it) was combining keyboards and drums with fronting the band. As a result, they had to rely on backing tracks for much of the percussion, as there is a limit to what even the most talented multi-instrumentalist can achieve on stage. Steve Hughes on bass and keyboards and Chris Jones on guitar completed the trio, both superlative musicians. I purchased the eponymous debut album at the merch desk and took mental note that they would be appearing at Prog for Peart in July. They had been the discovery of Winter's End and I already knew that they had the potential to blossom into true prog greatness.
Dawntreader, a song inspired by Jonathan's grandfather being forced to trudge long distances to the mines where, after an exhausting day at the coal face, he had to repeat the weary walk home. This song perfectly encapsulates the hallmarks of Tribe3: a soaring, heart-wrenching melody, transforming a harsh reality from ordinary life into a moment of pure and concentrated beauty, inherently optimistic, with a guitar solo drenched in emotion, and exquisite, heartfelt vocals combined with shimmering, luminous keys. However, it was not until HRH Prog in November that they were joined by drummer Gregory Paulett, an inspired choice, whose style matches military precision with the discipline and restraint required to strike the perfect balance, never overwhelming or gratuitously dominating the sound, but underpinning it and driving it forward with the assurance and humility possessed only by the most skilled.
I have always found the symbolism of the Voyager probe fascinating and endlessly poignant. Humanity's desire and yearning for something beyond itself, something greater. The overwhelming and unbearable despair of loneliness. Could we really be alone in the universe? The small and fragile hunk of metal with a message from our civilization, on a golden record, travelling through the endless void, the paradox of the hope it embodies and our longing for contact leading to the probe's total isolation, surely the ultimate irony. The thought that this tiny craft might continue forever, long after humanity has destroyed itself, carrying the last remnants of what we had created, is infinitely romantic, perhaps the most romantic image that remains in a world of prosaic pragmatism and cynicism leeched of magic, wonder and the sacred. Yet here culture and science are not at odds, but united in an effort to overcome human limitations. Science at the service of culture, science as the literal and metaphorical vehicle of culture.
This is all beautifully conveyed by the album's opening track, Voyager, an epic in three sections, with Jonathan's voice almost breaking towards the end beneath the weight of the expectations of the mission, the impossibility of it ever being accomplished, the nothingness stretching on and on in a way no human mind can grasp. Never deviating from the programmed parameters, this would generate an anguish beyond the limits of sanity. This introduces a theme which recurs throughout the album: an exploration of the impact of failures in communication. For the Voyager probe, the inability to send data home cruelly deprives it of purpose, condemning it to drift through the infinite expanses in complete and inconsolable isolation.
The relative sparseness of the instrumental section The Depth And The Wonder perfectly mirrors the emptiness of space. The silence, the deprivation of contact. Voyager's trajectory into the unknown is tragic, most likely futile, as is all human endeavour. It emphasises the insignificance of humanity on the cosmic scale more eloquently and subtly than lyrics can. Everything in our societies is geared towards denying this, whether through religion or its secular equivalent of unbridled consumerism. Again, the terrible reality of our transitoriness shines through in the music. With its sense of forward motion, sailing through cosmic winds, before the vocal resumes again, this section is as austere and terrifyingly poignant as the subject demands.
Voyager is my favourite track on the album, indeed one of my favourite prog songs of all time, a truly moving and haunting piece worthy of what Voyager stands for, that tiny spark in the darkest depths of the unknown beyond all human experience, beyond the pale blue dot.
I had the immense privilege of being entrusted with the album in its formative stages, as it developed and progressed. Falls Like Rain is the song I have listened to most frequently, as it instantly embedded itself in my brain and refuses to be dislodged (not that I would want it to be!), making it the obvious choice as the single. It is one of the darker and bleaker songs on the album, entirely in line with the subject of how our rapacious and amoral overlords treat us with complete callousness and contempt as resources to be exploited, shamelessly manipulating us to extract compliance, and how the wounds this inflicts run deep, piercing our very souls. Should we resign ourselves to it? Is it even possible to stop their predatory behaviour given the overwhelming power imbalance? Is any form of communication possible with them on any level?
As the lyrics eloquently state:
Their brittle crowns will always shine
As long as you're bending the knee
Technically believe their right to bend their might and will
Straight through your soul
With its pristine production, it cuts like a shard of glass, matching the anguish and sense of helpless disempowerment so movingly conveyed by both instruments and vocals. There is a slightly 1980s feel to the music with hints of the Blue Nile in the repeated motif which binds the composition together. The use of the cymbals in particular stands out. They sound almost like steam being released from an engine, evoking images from Fritz Lang's Metropolis, with the workers endlessly and mind-numbingly turning the dictatorial dials of the machine until their shift ends, devoid of agency, shuffling homeward, completely drained and demoralised.
The Last Encore continues with the leitmotif of a breakdown in communication, drawing on the most famous example in fiction, Shakespeare's star-crossed lovers, to reveal its tragic extreme. Jonathan narrates the tale, singing from both perspectives. Beautifully textured, it opens delicately with flute-like keys and Jonathan's reverential, almost breathless vocals capturing the intensity of Romeo's affections at his most vulnerable moment of despair. Of all the songs on the album, The Last Encore best showcases Chris' astounding gift for condensing the emotions with laser-like precision, leaving the listener simultaneously elated and overwhelmed. Steve's bass is also at its most intricately satisfying, perfectly in step with Jonathan's percussion (Gregory joining the band for live performances only, Jonathan resumes his original role in addition to singing), further enhancing the sweeping grandeur of the soundscape. The return of the flute heralds a change in pace and mood, permeated with melancholy, as the tide of grief can no longer be stemmed, Juliet's realisation of her lover's death flooding in with the force of a tidal wave, the keys shimmering like a harp. The searing anguish and unravelling of loss in Jonathan's voice as he issues Juliet's futile and increasingly desperate pleas for Romeo to wake up cements his credentials as one of the most compelling and talented singers in contemporary prog. And just when you think they cannot put you through the wringer any more, Chris' guitar delivers the gut punch from 5 minutes 21, soaring with Jonathan's plaintive "We move onward", to reach a sublimely devastating climax, with the piano gently setting us down on the lid of the sepulchre in the glooming peace before departing with its final flourish.
This is followed by a short instrumental, Requiem For A Friend, in tribute to Jez Rowden, to whom the album has most fittingly been dedicated, highly esteemed and sorely missed reviewer for both DPRP and The Progressive Aspect. He was the first to champion Tribe3 and this achingly beautiful piece will help keep his memory alive in the hearts of all those who loved him.
It flows seamlessly into the title track, Life Amongst Strangers, to quote Jonathan, his "curtain-twitcher" epic about his fascination with people. Everyone has a life and a story to tell, yet we are so many in number, it is impossible for us to become acquainted with them all.
From a sociological point of view, a hint of Durkheim's anomie (the term he used to describe the sense of alienation and hopelessness arising from the disintegration of social norms) pervades the song:
Learning through teaching, the warfare of school – didn't read it, don't know it
No meaningful meeting, no deal to be sold – don't understand you, don't want to
Communities fading, our streets growing cold – don't see them, don't know them
Disasters unfold in the blink of an eye – too many, can't take it
Ultimately, we are indeed strangers living parallel lives; preoccupied with eking out a living and looking after our own individual interests, it becomes easy for us to lose touch and become isolated, reduced to faces behind the countless anonymous windows we casually pass each day, lit only by the glow of computer or smartphone screens in the futile search for an emotionally and intellectually satisfying virtual substitute for a lost sense of community. Again, this vividly evokes the condequences of a structural breakdown in communication.
The opening keyboards create an atmosphere of unperturbed serenity, interspersed with hints that all might not be as tranquil as it first appears. At just under one minute in, the pace picks up, and the song opens out into a glorious neo-prog epic — the term "neo-prog" holds no hint of the pejorative for me, as it is my preferred sub-genre of prog by a huge margin, encompassing the bands closest to my heart, Comedy of Errors and IQ chief amongst them — at times reminiscent of Frost*. The guitar solo and keys at 10 minutes in, as the song builds to its stunning climax, are unutterably sublime, with Jonathan's vocals in the higher range rivalling those of the divine That Joe Payne.
As with the Voyager probe, World War I has long been a staple of prog, for example, Freedom To Glide's albums commemorating the Great War, Fish (The High Wood), Credo (Too Late... To Say Goodbye) and IQ (The Seventh House), perhaps because of the almost inconceivable scale of the carnage, perhaps because of its symbolic value in the transition from the era of romanticised cavalry charges to the unimaginable hell of industrialised warfare, reducing human beings to mere strips of flesh on the cruel barbed wire. The bravery of the individual soldiers rendered (unforgivably) meaningless by wave upon wave callously ordered to clamber over the top into the eerie flickering of the flares leaving them piteously vulnerable. The tributes to their sacrifice echoed in stone in every tiny village, in what should be the roll call of shame for the elite who willingly sent them to their deaths in defence of their own privilege. It is very difficult to come up with an original take on this epic subject, but The Front Line succeeds in doing so.
A haunting echoing guitar opens the track, joined by an almost incongruously light synthesiser indicating that this is going to be radically different in tone and approach from the portentously doom-laden (the aural equivalent of wading through the endless mud of the trenches), a hint of Thomas Dolby in the synths; these are the final moments of dread calm prior to combat, as the troops fix their bayonets (and it is this single image which creates the association with the Great War, although lyrically, it could otherwise be emblematic of static conflicts everywhere, including Ukraine, a latter-day war of attrition just over a century later; at an individual level, the horror is invariable) Jonathan's voice soars with the intensifying keys, rising above the battlefield like a recording angel, pen at the ready to take the names of the soon-to-be-fallen.
Each section mirrors the respective stage of the narrator's experience, expertly changing pace and mood as required. At just under four minutes, a guitar solo picks up and further amplifies the heart-wrenching agony of the inevitable knowledge of a fate already sealed. At 4 minutes 54, a sinister voice exposes the true horror of events, as shrapnel fills the sky, cutting the men down as they traverse No Man's Land, a scene unfolding almost in slow motion, the drumbeats like pounding shells raining down randomly and mercilessly, and again the guitar almost pulls us back from the thick of the action, the sight of which would be too unbearable. This is reminiscent of the scene in one of the greatest films ever made, The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp, where lifelong friends Theo and Wynne-Candy engage in a fencing match, the stupidity and futility of which are emphasised by the camera symbolically withdrawing and rising above the petty strife. Intertwining with the keyboards, the guitar melody is punctuated by the cries of the dying, the drums whirring like a machine gun angrily spewing bullets, as the song reaches its searing apotheosis with Jonathan's final vocals and chorus, before the return of the initial echoing guitar, its repetition now all the more poignant. In Jonathan's exquisitely poetic rendering: "For in my blood-red garden, silent I will leave". This is a truly worthy addition to the prog pantheon of remembrance.
If Voyager, Life Amongst Strangers and The Front Line had not already proven that Tribe3 have produced an album to be counted in the ranks of the very best that contemporary prog has to offer, it concludes with Evening Tide, the first song I was privileged to hear, and it quite simply blew me away. This is a work of immaculate beauty, a bittersweet epic about the Earth and the Moon, but with an additional layer of meaning which returns to the theme of communication (or lack thereof), charting the trajectory of many relationships, which begin with an all-consuming blaze of passion and mutual fascination, only for the lovers' ardour to cool and for them to drift slowly apart:
Sincerely, I give to you
All the stars in the sky
But you're moving much further from me and then
Your presence here calms my fear, to separate causes pain
It opens majestically with sumptuous and soaring keyboards, joined by the guitar at just over one minute in, adding even greater emotional depth. A quieter, more pensive section follows with Jonathan's gorgeous vocals gradually building in intensity. When the guitar once again combines with the keys at the 11-minute mark the effect is astounding. If this piece does not move you, you are devoid of a soul. My initial thought was Dawntreader on steroids, meaning that it possesses every component that makes Dawntreader so compelling: the opulent melody, the heartfelt and sincere emotion, yet it somehow succeeds in distilling them even further into a heady and potent brew that sends the listener floating away on a cloud of proggy bliss. I cannot imagine a better way for the album to conclude.
Life Amongst Strangers reveals Tribe3's full and glorious potential. This is an album which is not afraid to breathe. Although it contains four epic tracks and clocks in at over an hour, it passes by in an instant without an extraneous note. It is a flawless masterpiece, an album not only destined for top 10 status in the year of its release, but to be cherished over a lifetime of repeated listening. "Awe-inspiring" is an adjective too often and too glibly used, yet seems entirely appropriate here, with its connotations of reverence and wonder, reflecting a genuinely superlative achievement.