Steve Hackett
At the Edge of Light

The legendary Steve Hackett is back with a dramatic looking album, his twenty-sixth studio album in his massive career spanning over many decades. At the Edge of Light is the name of this new album and one can’t help being quite impressed with how much this guy has managed to put together as a musician. This new album offers ten new tracks that Steve and his ensemble of great musicians has completed it over an 18-month period. Unusual for Steve is that there are no acoustic moments, he calls it more of a rock album, with a rather broad definition of the rock genre. There are also unusual instruments like sitar and didgeridoo, and his brother plays the flute and there are four drummers, quite a massive project in many ways.

You will recognise that it is an album put together by Steve Hackett, it has his trademark guitar style and melodies, as well as the vocals that are familiar to anyone knowing Steve’s work. But he also moves in new directions widening his approach and I would say that it is more exciting from the creative and stylistic perspective than the albums preceding it. The production is excellent. There are magical guitar playing, great vocals and great sounds overall. Quite the varied album is it as well and the playing time feels quite sensible with the ten tracks requiring fifty-five of your minutes to play to completion. And you can hear from the first time you play this album that all those minutes are well thought out and performed to excellence.

It is probably one of the best albums that we will see this year and barring a really unexpected and fantastic year in music I am fairly sure it will be featured in the top ten I will have in the summary I write on December 31. It is that good. The songs on the album are all of the highest quality and I don’t think that the album shows any weakness in any part, it is just great in every sense of the way. Excellent album. It is great how Steve always manages to make fresh sounding albums while young musicians manages to feel repetitive and boring already from the first time you hear them, isn’t that strange? Perhaps it is just a testament to the greatness of Steve Hackett.

At the Edge of Light is an excellent album, really impressive and it comes highly recommended for anyone who likes great music but maybe especially for those into the more progressive kind of rock. It is just great from the beginning to the end where I think that perhaps the ending track, by the narrowest of margins, stands as the strongest one on the album – but all tracks are quite brilliant, meaning that the album is just excellent. Steve Hackett certainly does his to start 2019 in the best of ways with this excellent album that I recommend you to buy.

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