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Official Sylvan web site

We never learn the father's name (he is alternately referred to as Dad or Daddy, always capitalized), but the daughter is given an earthy name: Violet, implying delicacy, beauty, tragedy, and a bit of self-defined royal bearing.

Violet is... well... a bit of a nutcase. Or at least she certainly comes off that way.

Violet has a recurring violent emotional reaction to the world around her, unable to connect emotionally with anything in the city except for her Daddy and patches of nature that spring up in a city described as being dominated by shiny tall buildings and scaffolding. Violet is a natural beauty, an earth child, surrounded by simultaneous mountains of architectural beauty and decay, her only solace the thought of plants creeping through the cracks in the concrete and steel world that surrounds her.

Each day I leave my realm, step out of my door – I breathe in carefully
Then from the black façades I watch the rain fall – and courage falls in me
I try to see the sky but I just see walls – they trap me silently
Some people shout at me and it’s a known call: the city jeers at me
And I can not, I can not stand it all …

...It bruises all my life and all I lived for – unfurls so ruthlessly
Exists to vandalize, I hate it much more – it kills the child in me
And naturally surrounds me day in, day out, phagocytizes all
They call it just progress I call it breakdown – am I the only one?
And I can not, I can not stand it all
And I can not, I can not stand it all
And I can not, I can not stand it all

Scaffolds rising through the sky … so threatening
They sprout and spill their concrete lies
If this is what you want to live through – just myopic curiosity
If this is what satisfies you – then I lost the faith I had in me
-- Forgotten Virtue

This is why teenagers are annoying
I know. That sounds like a typically overly dramatic 14-year-old girl with a limited grasp of imagery, an overdeveloped sense of self-importance, and a well-filled bag of clichés. It reads like anguished poetry from an imaginative adolescent. That Violet isn't entirely original is entirely the point. She's supposed to be someone you know, although she is someone weird, annoying, and fond of black nail polish and black lipstick.

Violet takes it all to unnatural extremes. She is seriously emotionally disturbed and as such, she is an untrustworthy narrator. Minor events, like simply walking out through the front door of her house, scream out with all of the drama of a teenage princess, but with Violet, you get bonus teeth and claws with the teen queen drama. The internal anguish of Violet goes on and on and on almost exhaustively, like a massively depressed and incredibly annoying version of Emily Dickinson. Worse: we never really get any strong visualizations of actual events in her life, we are left relatively clueless as to what in real life is continually setting her off. Instead we get a heavy dose of her long litany of violent emotional reactions to the unspecified events.

Sylvan walks a fine line here. Introspection within introspection without any external actions to balance against -- that gets old fast. You almost want to help kill Violet just for being so annoyed and annoyingly obscure.

It would all be comically insufferable except for three other things that are going on in this tale.

First, and most importantly, is the incredibly beautiful sonic soundtrack, the complex, beautifully composed and performed music of Sylvan.

The second is the repeated professed love that Violet has for her Dad and for the beauty of resolute and undying nature. While Violet is just as alienated and brooding and dark as the character Pink in The Wall, there is one singular difference: Pink just wanted to beat you, me, himself, and everyone else into a bloody pulp because we're all so damned ugly. Violet knows love and beauty and she wants it in her life, she aches for it.

An eco-morality play
The third is the hook of this whole tale, the horrifying biter that eats into Violet's soul and that is, in reality, eating into us all -- that this is, like the story of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, all a metaphor for how mankind is fatally relating to mankind and fatally relating to the planet that mankind resides on. Posthumous Silence is a morality play.

More accurately, it's an eco-morality play. Violet is us, all of us, the collective mass of mankind that is bound by gravity. Dad (always capitalized) is... well, if I have to tell you that, you'll never figure any of the rest of this out on your own. The city is our mechanized technological world, removing us from nature and attempting to kill nature in the process.

In Violet's world, as she continues her search for her personal Eden, one thing becomes horrifyingly clear: if we continue our war on nature, nature will win and we will lose. While we, like Violet in the end, may gain entrance into a spiritual Eden, that is of little comfort to those of us not quite ready to shed our (or our children's children's) mortal coils.

No happy ending
The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway has a happy,.. well,... Broadway ending. The central character Rael, as played by Gabriel, has learned to stop being an insufferable selfish shit and has instead grown through his own tragic losses to finally become a human being. In a weird nod to Werner Erhard's est concept, Rael finally gets "IT" and becomes part of "IT," having finally figured the core tenets of "IT" out. The Lamb Lies Down ends in celebration of Rael and "IT" in a song appropriately entitled, "IT." "IT" is a cheesy moment in an otherwise flawless album, a gift-wrapped ending worthy of a Disney cartoon.

In sharp contrast, the self-titled final track of Posthumous Silence is a eulogy, both for the deceased fictional character Violet and the still very much alive human race.  Despite the depressing descent into the inevitable extinction that Violet (and Sylvan, and to a certain extent most of Western Europe) sees as the future for mankind, Posthumous Silence is a celebration of our doomed ability to recognize and imagine beauty and to hold on to that image, our Eden, until the end. For Violet, and for Sylvan, that is our hope:

Colors please grow for me, paint my world rosily,
Keep me just sheltered and warm.
Save my lost blossomy, values I trusted in
Show me …
And it felt like a rush of blood to my head
And it woke in me feelings I had hidden away
And I start to paint this place as marvelous as it can be
And I paint it colorful to cover all the cracks I see
Draw the lines I should have made so long ago with grateful strokes
Let it fill the place of distrust and impenetrable smoke
-- The Colors Changed

In the end of her diary, after acknowledging the inevitable oncoming end, she prays to her Dad to forgive her for starting the events that would lead to her own demise, reminding him that it is not his fault and the she still loves him, even from the grave:

Please let me know you’ll understand, it’s not your fault I’m leaving
I’ll cry the tears for you, oh Dad, please let me reach my Eden

Disappear into thin air – a new leaf’s turned over
Vanish from the world out there, for the wind got colder
Pleasantly I found the truth guiding me back to my roots
Finally it leads me soon to origins where I belong
-- A Kind of Eden

Tragedy and beauty go hand in hand all through Posthumous Silence, and the hauntingly beautiful music itself brings that home again and again. The soaring guitar solos of Jan Petersen and guest guitarist Guido Bungenstock (the latter more than passingly reminiscent of Genesis' Steve Hackett on works like The Cinema Show and Supper's Ready), the swirling piano and full orchestra sounds from keyboardist Volker Sőhl, and the powerhouse heavy metal riffs liberally mixed in -- all create a sonic beauty that recalls simultaneously all of the best elements of The Wall, Quadrophenia, Tales From Topographic Oceans, and the aforementioned Lamb Lies Down. Sylvan delves deep into the history of classical rock while pulling the best elements from modern rock and roll. This is grand and glorious prog music, pure sonic heaven meticulously recorded and played. Sylvan is a grand and theatrical prog band in the richest prog tradition of greats like Yes, Genesis, King Crimson, Pink Floyd, and Jethro Tull. The guys in Sylvan are no second-rate artistic wannabes, they have artistically arrived. Just not in America. Yet.

As to Posthumous Silence, this isn't this generation's The Wall, at least not yet. It damned well should be, though. Posthumous Silence, as a complete work, is that good.

The one major flaw in Posthumous Silence: typically Teutonic and Wagnerian, the entire work is devoid of any humor whatsoever. The Lamb Lies Down was loaded with inside jokes and puns. The Wall, Tommy, Quadrophenia, David Bowie's Outside, even that dirge to pop theology, Jesus Christ Superstar, had a few moments of levity, even if most of the humor in those pieces were dark jokes.

New live releases from Sylvan on CD and DVD, and they're finally coming to America
Which brings us, then, to the new live CD and DVD. The DVD contains a complete uninterrupted 70-minute performance of Posthumous Silence before a small but adoring crowd in their hometown of Hamburg, plus a bonus live version of Sylvan's 20-minute opus, Artificial Paradise, the evening's encore finale.

Artificial Paradise is no small piece either. It's worthy of a lot more attention than I'm giving it here. A magnificent piece of music on its own, albeit one that shows that English does not come easy for the German proggers -- lead singer Marco Glűhmann's creative pronunciation of the word "conspicuously" is either amusing or maddening, depending on what level of peeves such barbarisms land on in your own mind. Glűhmann pronounces it "con-spish-us-lee." I can only remind myself of how I incorrectly pronounced the word "asylum" (ah-ZEE-lum) for months after I first encountered it in print as a kid.

The double live CD set contains all that and eight more live tracks from Sylvan's canon of studio albums. If you wanted a good introductory overview of Sylvan's work to date, you couldn't ask for better. Again, like the best of prog bands from years gone by, Sylvan only sound fuller and better live.

As to the bulk of the DVD performance, if the metaphor of Violet as us didn't become clear in the audio versions, it becomes abundantly clear in the stage performance as projected visuals provided by Greenpeace pepper the performance and bring home the story of Violet vs. Man vs. Nature.

Glűhmann, seemingly channeling Peter Gabriel's performance as Rael, becomes Violet, totally mesmerizing an adoring audience into thinking he is her, and he does it without seeming incredibly cliché gay in the process. When she cries out, he agonizes, when she shares her joy, he is radiant. Without the aid of costumes or props, Glűhmann manically stomps, prowls, and glides around the stage, alternately writhing in agony and soaring with joy, all the while jumping in and out of character. While the audio recordings of these songs are themselves a thing of beauty, Glűhmann's performance visually brings it all home and adds a depth to the work that you would never know you were missing from just listening to the live or studio recordings of Posthumous Silence.

Even though the band is ten years old, Sylvan is still Germany's (and prog rock's) best kept secret here in the states. U.S. audiences will finally get a first look at Sylvan in October as the band will play two (and only two) dates, their first performances ever in America. The two gigs, natch, are on the other side of the continent from me: Seattle and the CalProg Fest in Whittier, California.

Maybe the hype that Sylvan can stir there will lead to a full U.S. tour.

One can only hope.

In the meantime, you can cure your jones with the live DVD coming out in a few weeks. Highly recommended? Oh yeah. It should be mandatory.

John Patten is the head of Web Operations for Creative Pages, and has worked in broadcasting for over 12 years. He can also be incredibly rude at times.