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As I hope I’ve made blatantly clear, I’m always looking for bands that mix various musical ideas in ways I haven’t heard, or at least haven’t noticed. I’m also afraid of becoming that guy that has heard so much music that the only thing he can get into is extremely abstract. The only mechanism I have to battle that is to actually restrict the amount of new music I choose to listen to. I kid you not, I actually have a queue of about 20 bands I’ve never listened to beyond a few 30-second clips, but I believe at least a couple of those are bound to be a new favorite band. Gazpacho was on deck a couple weeks ago, and I’ve since purchased two of their albums. These guys show some real promise.

Gazpacho is roughly what I’d call a progressive rock band. They have the core of a progressive rock band but the surface appearance of an older rock band. Their singer immediately reminded me of an odd mixture of Thom Yorke and Jeff Buckley, but what makes Gazpacho a bit on the outskirts of progressive rock is their ambient, art rock, and folk influences.

I first purchased their album Night (2007) honestly because I read that the album was essentially one long song… highlighting their ambient influence. This is no new idea of course, but it’s executed differently than I’ve heard before. Many of the other bands I’ve heard try this concept didn’t write one song so much as several that just happened to seamlessly connect forming distinct movements. Granted, Night has a few movements, but every track falls back to the same theme and focuses around a common riff. There are a couple departures that I personally feel don’t fit, but they didn’t detract enough from the album to make me less interested. Perhaps those of you with a fonder opinion of folk or world music will appreciate said departures more than me. But despite the genre flip here and there, somehow the underlying theme and riff are still evident. All in all, Night is a great album, but the very nature of it’s theme makes it hard to simply pick up this album. You’ll need time to hear the whole album to appreciate it.

Although I enjoyed Night, I had the suspicion I didn’t like them as much as I should. It was hard for me to get into Night because it effectively is a 53 minute song. If that sort of concept album doesn’t appeal to you, I suggest starting with Gazpacho’s latest album, Tick Tock (2009). Once again, they maintain a common theme through most of the album, but Tick Tock is much more energetic, less ambient… and not one enormous song. The theme is right in the album title. There is almost always either a synthesizer sample or a pedal tone from one of the guitars or bass guitar mimicking the tick of a clock’s pendulum. So once again, I give them props for maintaining a theme across an entire album; making it an album, not just a collection of songs. Of course, the album also has many of the other qualities I practically require in any album I purchase: creative song structures, eloquent syncopation, and natural transitions.  Sometimes they even throw some curve balls taking the song where you didn’t expect; and in a good way.

In the grand scheme of things, Gazpacho isn’t as great as other progressive rock bands like Porcupine Tree, Demians, or Riverside, but they are certainly an interesting departure from typical progressive rock. I hear a lot of stylistic choices that remind me of very ambient and experimental bands but they still have a strong, structured base that appeals to those not yet over-exposed to the underground music scene.