Niels' Top 10 Albums of 2017 - Number 5

5. Discipline – Captives of the Wine Dark Sea

Discipline is not a prog band. It is a punk band that happens to make prog rock. Everything they make has an anarchic feel, as well as a homespun quality. Their albums few and far between, they are not a big name but a real cult legend, whose seminal 1997 work Unfolded Like Staircase is one of the essential prog albums of the 1990's.

Twenty years on and only one other album in between, Discipline is not quite the same band. They have a new guitarist, but that's not the main thing. Larger-than-life frontman Matthew Parmenter has grown older, wiser and milder. Where before he was a really intense young man, a depressed clown on the brink of mental breakdown, now he looks at the world and its woes with a sense of detatched irony.

It's reflected in the music, which is less intense, more positive-sounding and has more room to breathe. Structurally, the album is a throwback to Push & Profit, the first album, while also being much more accomplished on the compositional level. Every song inhabits its own interesting world. The finale to “Burn The Fire Upon The Rocks” is an incredibly satisfying way to close things off. Parmenter remains a lyricist beyond compare, witty and insightful, sometimes painfully real. It may not be the intense roller coaster ride of its predecessors, but it's much more replayable than any of them.