Bracket – The Last Stage

This is Bracket‘s eighth full length album, the difference between this and their previous albums is that The Last Page only contains one song, one seventy minute long song, yes you read that right. Warren’s Song Part 28 is the sole epic length track, it is centred around the character Bracket created over two decades ago with Warren’s Song Part One (and Two), these two tracks appeared on the 1994 album, 924 Forestville St.

This is the follow up to 2014’s Hold Your Applause, it is certainly a bold move making an album that contains only one epic length song, but this is a gamble that appears to have paid off. As with any song of this length it’s a collection of ideas that are thematically linked, this could have been made as a regular album, with the song broken up into bite size chunks, but I don’t think that would have worked as well, at least in this case, I don’t want everyone else getting the same idea. It opens with orchestrated vocals before the guitars kick in, Warren’s Song Part 28 then veers through all of Bracket‘s trademark punk stylings. The tempo varies and the style shifts throughout the song, it builds things up and breaks them down again constantly over its hour plus running time.

This makes NOFX‘s Decline look like, well like a regular NOFX song, that track, along with The Damned‘s Curtain Call, was the longest track I was aware of by punk band, both clocking in at around seventeen minutes. This is over four times the length of either of those epic songs. This shouldn’t work, but it does, in making The Last Page Bracket have made a longer song than any prog rock band has ever managed, without any of the tedium or elongated solos that blighted that genre. Now the question is, are they going to play it live?

The Last Page can be ordered here