Tomorrow We’ll Be Gone, the latest album from Bilbao’s The Space Octopus, is an album soaked in rock riffs, but with the majority of tunes sounding not too dissimilar from each other. There’s really very little in the way of variation, with tracks played at the same fast tempo, though tracks like ‘Paralysed’ and title track ‘Tomorrow We’ll Be Gone’ are brave attempts at power ballads.
There’s plenty of nifty, fast driving riffing on the album, and even more fast played diddla diddla guitar runs and sounds like they’ve taken guitar lessons from Yngwie Malmstein. On tracks like ‘Our Time Is Running Out,’ they play so fast it can almost be measured out in Mach speed. There’s some undeniable guitar work and they can play, but an effective guitar break doesn’t have to be played at the speed of light to make its point. Neither does the same solo have to be played on every track.
However, on the all too short instrumental track, ‘Pause,’ they are redeemed by showing what they can really do with some quite dextrous and nimble-fingered acoustic guitar playing. Ultimately, however, after several plays, it’s clear the music is competently played but with the exception of the track above, there’s nothing on this album which would make you want to play it again. It’s all mid-table second division rock stuff, and while Space Octopus could well make a good opening act for a major league rock attraction such as Saxon or Judas Priest, or as a headlining act in a small pub, there’s little here to suggest this album will make any kind of inroads anywhere.
