For quite a while now, I’ve been intrigued by Swedish proggers Beardfish and their distinctive, highly imaginative output. My level of interest grew considerably on encountering them live in 2013, in an all-too-brief slot supporting Spock’s Beard. Since then, I’ve been awaiting new music from them with a great sense of anticipation.

What, then, to make of latest release +4626-COMFORTZONE?

First, and most obviously, there’s that bizarre title – a reference to the dialling code for the birthplace of songwriter & founder member Rikard Sjöblom and his compatriots, and to the stifling small-town attitudes that can persist in such places. This, indeed, seems to be a theme linking several tracks on the album, not least Comfort Zone, where the protagonist bemoans his inability to leave that smothering environment, declaring

I don’t even like it here
And I do nothing but curse the very lot of you
I hate everything and everyone – except for the chosen few

A lifetime suffering bullying and intolerance in such places can lead to even more extreme antipathy, as demonstrated in Can You See Me Now?, the dark tale of a killer “setting out with a scythe to calm their hubris”. The message conveyed here is a powerful one:

And as your children shape themselves in your image
When they grow up to be just like you
And when they push the kid with the glasses
Face-first in a puddle of mud
Will you secretly smile and think “That’s my boy”?

Memorable though these moments are, it is the second half of this album that truly shines, offering depth and variety aplenty. The One Inside: Part 2 is delicately melodic, subtle and restrained, standing in stark contrast to out-and-out rocker Daughter / Whore. The latter, with its cheeky opening nod to Motörhead, evokes the gritty heaviness that characterised much of 2012’s riff-saturated The Void, but overall, the album is closer in feel to the signature expansive progginess that graced 2011 release Mammoth and, more particularly, its predecessor Destined Solitaire.

Two other tracks deserve special mention. If We Must Be Apart (A Love Story Continued) is the long-overdue sequel to an epic from 2005’s The Sane Day. As the longest track on the album, it is equally deserving of the ‘epic’ moniker. A Love Story dealt with a relationship break-up and this superior follow-up charts its distant aftermath. The story is terribly poignant, telling of a woman who can’t forget her past:

Now he’s more of a ghost who haunts her
And her husband can never know
Even with the new life that grows inside her
She still thinks about him from time to time

Her thoughts are interwoven with the words of her former lover who, unable to live in the present, writes her a desperate letter:

I cannot believe it’s been so long since we last spoke
You should see me now and how my life is just a joke
Everything I do reminds me of everything we used to do

Suddenly, events take a much darker and more disturbing turn, encompassing suicide threats, Internet stalking, black magic and a drug overdose, leading to a shocking conclusion:

She remembers that night when she found him laying
Curled up like a ball inside a circle of candle lights
He wasn’t dead, he wasn’t there, it wasn’t him no more

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, because unexpected twists and turns are a hallmark of this most fascinating of bands. Anyway, this track can justly lay claim to being the album’s masterpiece.

Ode To The Rock’n’Roller is even more compelling – from a lyrical perspective, at least – than If We Must Be Apart. Rooted in bitter personal experience, with its barbed swipe at the tribute band circuit and the attitudes of some music ‘fans’, it proves that Sjöblom can rival Andy Tillison for acerbic wit.

The song’s protagonist experiences a moment on stage where he feels transported to “a place where they make music that’s not written to accompany the vacuuming of your flat”, where “one minute I was rolling’ on the river, the next I was caught up in the rites of spring”. Predictably, this doesn’t go down well with the paying customers:

They look pretty pissed out there
I opened my heart and my soul for you
But you didn’t understand – your mind was locked
You just thought I was trying to be cool

Sjöblom leaves us in no doubt as to his disdain for these closed minds:

They didn’t come here to listen, they came here to drink
So play those three chords over and over
So they don’t have to think
Be that noise in the background
Just keep it on the backbeat
The rhythm of drinking
Til the singer goes “Yeah Yeah Ye-ah”

Thankfully, Beardfish are not content with being just a noise in the background. This album more than holds its own amongst their stellar prog portfolio, being cleaner sounding and more refined than predecessor The Void, and deliciously dark, to boot. Thoroughly recommended.