Red Lloyd - Duke (2025)

Country: Germany
Style: Progressive Rock
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 10 Jan 2025
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website | YouTube

Here's something interesting. It's enjoyable too, but it's more interesting than enjoyable, which is unfortunate. Apparently Red Lloyd is Frank Altpeter, who sings and plays keyboards in Moore and More, a German tribute band to Gary Moore. I haven't heard them but they won't sound anything like this. This is a prog rock album, a tribute in a sense to the Genesis of 1980, because Altpeter saw them release Duke and envisaged a concept album about a mediaeval nobleman that, needless to say, was not what Duke was.

So, forty years later during the COVID-19 pandemic, he wrote what he thought it would have been back in 1980 before he actually bought a copy and heard something else. He then recorded it in as authentic a manner as he could, researching the instruments that Genesis used and then locating working examples of the same to play. This is a glorious starting point for a concept album, at once inspired by and yet still not at all based on an existing work by someone else. That provides plenty of leeway too, so this both sounds like Genesis in 1980 and doesn't. Certainly, Altpeter's voice is far deeper than Phil Collins's and sounds especially dissimilar when he gets emphatic on songs such as Ponderings and Duke's Rise. Throughout, the instrumentation is a lot closer.

The concept is relatively clear, of a good and honest duke who's betrayed by his men and vanishes into the desert. While he gets all introspective there over a long period of time, his legend builds back home and a rumour grows that he'll return. However, rather bizarrely, the copy I'm listening to has the tracks presented in a completely different order to what's listed on Bandcamp, one that oddly seems to flow better. It made me happier to see that mine is the stated order on Red Lloyd's official website.

Now, why Bandcamp shuffles these tracks, I have no idea. It would seem to make sense to put Duke Intro at the beginning, for instance, given that it features narration and sound effects to get this album underway, and Duke's Return at the end, as he may or may not show up to make the faithful happy. That's what my order/Red Lloyd's website order does. Bandcamp's doesn't. Either way, the concept flows loosely, so maybe we can shuffle these tracks around without ever losing sight of the general idea.

It's probably fair to point out here that Duke isn't my favourite Genesis album and this isn't up to its standards. However, there's still value here, Altpeter generating some pleasant grooves to fall into, some capable story songs that succeed in keeping our attention and, above all, instrumental sections to get lost in. There's nothing wrong with his voice but I preferred the instrumentation, a majority of it courtesy of Altpeter but with additional guitarwork from an old collaborator, Daniel J. S. Lewis, and Günter Schlünkes, who plays guitar and bass for German prog rockers Riven Earth.

Of course I have no idea whose guitar is whose. I can just call out how lovely it is on Crosses, City of Broken Toys and Ponderings, to give just three prominent examples. The latter two are highlights for me and Tonight is worth calling out too for other reasons. It's the one that gets catchy. There's nothing here on the level of Misunderstanding, let alone Turn It On Again, but occasionally there is a serious attempt to mimic that sort of hook. It's most obvious vocally on Tonight and otherwise on City of Broken Toys and Duke's Rise.

Interestingly, City of Broken Toys starts out with a guitar reminiscent of the Alan Parsons Project, but just before the two minute mark, it shifts to being about as close as this album gets to Genesis in 1980. Duke's Rise reprises that but the other way around, starting out close but veering away as the song runs on, Altpeter delivering his story in a more vehement voice than Collins ever had. My Time Will Come does it too, driven by an excellent beat and authentic keyboards.

And so this is as it was perhaps always doomed to be, a full length concept album born of a musing that trawls in some wonderful stories and not a lot more. After all, I have written a lot more about what this album aims to do than I have about what it actually does. However, that's telling in itself and it's why I started out by saying that it's enjoyable but more interesting.

I could talk about how the concept is never fully wrapped up, left for us to continue in our heads as we wonder if the duke does return or not. I could highlight that some of the tracks are just there, most notably for me Duke Intro, which is a tame intro for the album (or for The Duke's Lament, depending on the version). It doesn't matter. What I've said here covers what it needs to.