Tuval Cain: Forging The Future

Israeli prog band’s debut album is as subtle as its cover.

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Is that a touch of the Beatles? No, hang on, that sounded like Deep Purple. Or was it Trapeze? There again, maybe it’s Jethro Tull. Or David Bowie? Yes, that is the problem here. While you have to applaud the vision and insight of Tuval Cain mainman David Lawrence Kuhn, there are simply too many ideas interwoven, the result being a mishmash that never flows properly.

It’s as if each song changes direction as the musicians involved suddenly come up with a new approach in the middle of the recording. So, everything is a disjointed amalgam of some brilliant music, but lacking the discipline that a strong producer would have brought to the project.

A Distant Well and No More Need are perhaps the finest tracks here. The former catches the more progressive notions investigated by early Purple, while the latter is imbued with the spirit of imbued with the spirit of Tull circa Songs From The Wood. And Retrobate sounds like the sort of thing Bowie might have come up with in the Low era.

There’s no doubting the talent here – the musicianship is quite superb – but Forging The Future ultimately lacks focus, and comes across like a collection of songs in desperate need of a stronger guiding hand.

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