New band Uncle Weevil’s nine-track debut album is a couple of months old but I made an exception to our usual coverage rules mainly on account of their unusual fusion of prog rock and power pop here.
Sweden is one of the last bastions of 1970s-style prog and we’ve reviewed many bands from there along the way these last few years but Uncle Weevil do distinctly bring something new to the party.
And it’s such a proggy name, isn’t it? It isn’t hard to imagine a Genesis track with that title, and the Weevil character being one that bathes in a mystical fountain after feeding his Hogweed plants and then avenges the death of his friend Henry by applying Cynthia’s – the murderer’s – croquet mallet to her own head.
(Genesis fans will get that; everyone else will think I’m mad).
Uncle Weevil are very much into intricate harmonies, odd time signatures and deep but humourous lyrics as all prog bands must be and all are evident on the selected sample track, the first on the album, ‘A Noble Engineer’.
It is very much the archetypal story in miniature, with a beginning, middle and end that is the essence of the six-minute prog track, whoever writes and plays it.
And it concerns an actual person, the Italian adventurer Umberto Nobile, who was an aeronautical engineer, designed the first Italian parachute (one of which he could have done with, himself) and undertook numerous trans-polar airship flights organised by the more famous Roald Amundsen, one of which was the first to make a Europe-America transpolar journey.
The second one almost killed him and did for some of his colleagues. It prompted the first ever ‘international rescue’ and not by Thunderbird 1, which hadn’t yet been dreamed up.
In disgrace for much of the rest of his life he fell out with Mussolini and finished his days trying to clear his name.
(Incidentally, that gives me an idea for another song – the pilot of the aircraft carrying the Manchester United team that crashed in 1958 at Munich and who was blamed for the accident when it wasn’t his fault. I don’t believe anyone has ever written a song about that).
‘A Noble Engineer’ deals with the second expedition, the crash and surviving crew members’ 90-day ordeal on the ice of Norway’s Svalbard, a notably bleak place.
The really clever thing they’ve managed to do here, mainly through the music but the vocals play their part too, is to synchronise the image of the lack of co-ordination and urgency of the search-cum-rescue mission (by way of the time changes) with the skilful organisation of the project as a whole until it fell apart (through the structured progression of the song).
Those might appear to be meaningless words but listen to it and watch the video and you might get to feel the same vibes as I did.
There were few 1970s prog bands that could do that but when they could it was their forte. I’m thinking especially of Yes and King Crimson.
Am I speaking of Uncle Weevil in the same breath?
I wouldn’t deny it.
The album covers a wide range of themes, from philosophical reflections to personal stories and social commentary.
Praise the Lord! Prog is alive and well and living in the Nordics.
Band members are: Peter Nilsson (guitar), Lasse Söhr (bass), Nikko Harrison (drums) and Mats Sandborgh (vocals and keyboards).
(p.s. Doesn’t Umberto Nobile look like Emmanuel Macron?)
Find them on:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/uncleweevil
X/Twitter: https://x.com/UncleWeevil
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/uncleweevil/
Bandcamp: https://uncleweevil.bandcamp.com/album/uncle-weevil
