This Year’s Model

AFTER SERIOUSLY REINING THINGS IN ON THE LATEST OFFERING BY HIS MAIN BAND, FROST*, PROG-ROCK STALWART JOHN MITCHELL BRINGS HIS AX TO THE FORE ON THE NEW LONELY ROBOT ALBUM, A MODEL LIFE

- Gregory Adams

THERE ARE MANY great reasons U.K. prog veteran John Mitchell begins his latest Lonely Robot album, A Model Life, with a cut called “Recalibrating.” For starters, it’s a ripper — a pulse-quickening piece of peak pop-fusion-era Police full of vibrantly polyrhythmic piano and the guitarist’s uncanny waggling. The tune takes inspiration from Mitchell having exited a 16-year personal relationship during the height of Covid lockdowns, the musician faced with pushing himself forward and “trying to find [his] way again.” Fittingly enough, A Model Life is likewise Mitchell’s return to his Lonely Robot solo project, after delivering last year’s Day and Age with his other longterm project, progressive supergroup Frost*. And in terms of his lead chops, A Model Life was also a chance to get his bearings back after reining things in on that earlier effort from Frost*.

“I wouldn’t say I was banned from doing guitar solos on the Frost* record, but [vocalist-keyboardist] Jem [Godfrey] and I agreed that — rather like there are no cymbals on Peter Gabriel III — there would be no widdily-widdily keyboard or guitar playing,” Mitchell says through a robust laugh. “We said, ‘no, what we’re going to do is sit on our hands for this album,’ which we did. [Outside of] about two bars of slight noodling, there are no guitar solos on Day and Age. I just thought [with A Model Life], ‘OK… we did that, now I’m going to go in the opposite direction.”