Progressive Rock
Spirit of Unicorn Music · 25 September 2026
“Hello, Hello” (4:57) comes in on a stadium chorus with no keyboard preamble at all, which is not how a Geoff Downes record usually starts. It is the sixth by Downes Braide Association, the partnership the Asia, Yes and Buggles keyboard player has kept going with singer and songwriter Chris Braide for fifteen years, and it arrives three years after Celestial Songs (2023): ten tracks, fifty-eight minutes.
The title track (8:20) is where Downes returns to the keyboard vocabulary he settled on with Skyscraper Souls (2017), the open chords and synth voicings you can name within a bar. Behind him is the standing band — Dave Bainbridge on guitars, Andy Hodge on bass, Ash Soan on drums, with Tim Weller on a few tracks — and Braide and Downes share both the writing and the production, which is why this sounds like a group rather than a two-man demo.
The guest list is short and well placed. Marc Almond sings “Juliet” (2:24), the briefest thing here; Emmi turns up on “Love and Loss” (3:16) and Delilah Barrett handles the narration. And there is David Longdon’s flute, recorded during the band’s 2018 sessions; the Big Big Train singer died in 2021. Roger Dean supplies another painting for the sleeve, and the booklet carries poems by Andy Partridge, Barney Ashton-Bullock and Dean Johnson.
All that apparatus promises a conceptual weight the songs never deliver. Of ten tracks, only two really earn the progressive tag: the title piece and “Lake of Memories” (14:29), the long one, which is also the best evidence that Braide can write at distance. The middle stretch (“Love and Loss”, “I Wish I’d Known” at 4:11, “Do You Remember?” at 4:54, “Wherever You Are Now” at 5:44) is four mid-tempo melodic songs tracing the same curve, and there Downes’ keyboard is decoration rather than argument. “King of Karma” (4:53) is the only one in that run reaching for something else, on an atmosphere that owes a little to Steven Wilson’s records.
Ten tracks, out on Spirit of Unicorn Music on 25 September. Two singles came first: “Wonderland” (5:12) on 31 July and “Hello Hello” on 1 September.
Rating: 7.6/10
Text by Guillem Cardós