CLONE

Giant Electric Pea - 1998

Rougher! That's the first impression you have when listening to this album for the first time, especially knowing that it came out after the complex progressive textures of Extinct Instinct! New vocalist Andy "Mac" McDermott has a rougher voice, and guitars are rougher as well, but Threshold are able to keep the balance, so we have heavy guitars and melodic vocals like in The Latent Gene, Angels or Freaks. Special mention for the trilogy Goodbye Mother Earth - Voyager II - Sunrise On Mars, one of the highlights of Threshold's career. The lyrical concept about, guess what, human cloning adds even more value to this very good come back. Unclonable!

Notes:

On the Thank-you's section it is listed the "Voyaher II choir", namely Jon Jeary, Mac, Tina Groom and Kelly West; these last two are Karl's and Richard's wives.

This is an extract from the Threshold fan club magazine "Devoted" Issue 3 - Winter 1998:

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After the completion of the last CD "Extinct Instinct", with its vague concept of "dreams", the band sat down to try and think of a fresh new concept for the next album. At the time the news had been filled with stories about Dolly the artificially created sheep, genetically modified food, and a mouse with a human ear, so they chose a working title of "Sheep", before changing it to the more sober "Genetic".

Months later they got together again and realised none of them had anything to say about genetics or sheep, so Jon added a subtle twist to the plot, suggesting that it could be about a genetically created human who, on discovering that he's been made too perfect with extreme intelligence, insight and telepathy, forms a rock band who go on to write a whole album about him. The rock band idea was dropped in favour of his alternative plot, which under the new working title "Clone", probably goes something like this:

The story starts with the opening track on the album called "Freaks", where scientists discover they can clone humans from artificially created genes. Our protagonist's mother enters the story in "Angels", who decides to have a clone baby after a rather bad argument with her parents. In "The Latent Gene" the baby is formed, and quickly grows up to discover in "Lovelorn" that he is totally superior to everybody, resulting in loneliness, isolation, and lots of people not appreciating being told how stupid they all are. In "Change" he soon realises that only his creator can help him so he vows to go in search of him, resulting in a far more positive outlook and the realisation that actually "Life's too good".

Unfortunately the world around him isn't too good at all, so with the immortal cry "Goodbye Mother Earth" (post-ironic "Wounded Land" references notwithstanding) he jumps aboard "Voyager II" and heads off for the read planet, as previously depicted on the cover of "Extinct Instinct" (allegedly). On arrival at his destination, he realises that this was where he was supposed to be all along, meets up with his creator and they sit down together to watch "Sunrise on Mars", totally unaware that they were nothing more than the product of a bass player's over-active imagination.
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(thanx to David Liddel for this excerpt)

Related band pictures: 1998