The Pineapple Thief: Show A Little Love

Very dark yet endearing prog.

By Malcolm Dome
( Classic Rock )
published

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Among the most féted of the younger generation of prog bands, The Pineapple Thief continue to display their intricate ability on this EP.

The centrepiece is a lengthy track called To Live And Die To Familiar Sound Of… which, for ease of listening, has been divided into four parts. And it’s here that The Pineapple Thief are at their finest, with a maturity that continues to take them into musical territory that can be almost brutal yet somewhat soothing.

The musicianship is often breathtaking, but this is one band who refuse to allow a prodigious ability to improvise to overshadow the core song.

The rest of this EP has the distince feel of filler material: there’s a single edit of Show A Little Love itself, plus acoustic versions of two songs and a remix of another from the band’s last album. Maybe they lacked confidence in the 16-minute suite. A shame, because that’s all we needed.

Malcolm Dome
Malcolm Dome

Malcolm Dome had an illustrious and celebrated career which stretched back to working for Record Mirror magazine in the late 70s and Metal Fury in the early 80s before joining Kerrang! at its launch in 1981. His first book, Encyclopedia Metallica, published in 1981, may have been the inspiration for the name of a certain band formed that same year. Dome is also credited with inventing the term "thrash metal" while writing about the Anthrax song Metal Thrashing Mad in 1984. With the launch of Classic Rock magazine in 1998 he became involved with that title, sister magazine Metal Hammer, and was a contributor to Prog magazine since its inception in 2009. He died in 2021.