Progressive Rock
4 September 2026
“My Blistering Mind” opens with Malcolm Galloway talking rather than singing, rapid-fire, over a syncopated groove. The chorus gets sung, an odd-metre instrumental passage cuts in at the minute-and-a-half mark, and the whole thing fades out on a drone. Three minutes and thirty-seven seconds that work as a front door and a warning at once: the thirteen tracks of “Parallel Lives”, the ninth album by Hats Off Gentlemen… It’s Adequate, are about anxiety, surveillance and mental wear, and the music follows them, changing metre and pulse every few bars.
The band is really Galloway (lead guitar, synths, lyrics, mixing and mastering) and Mark Gatland (bass, additional guitars and synths), with Kathryn Thomas on flutes, who shares the writing credit on track three. That track, “Never Really Felt Like Home”, is where the record first slows down: an instrumental with the bass flute carrying the melody, Thomas moving to concert flute halfway through, and a pastoral coda. “Intermission” starts on a few bars of near-conservatoire piano and ends up in funk-fusion with a slow bridge in the middle. And “Eversion”, seven minutes long, builds out of a Gatland bass line into something frantic, with Galloway’s voice — it owes a debt to seventies Bowie — narrating a breakdown in the first person while the band keeps shifting underneath. The counterweight is “Pretty Blue Fox”: instrumental, open synth phrases, a rhythm section that barely asserts itself. You can hear that Galloway writes contemporary chamber music away from the band.
The closer, “Just Hold On (Pts 1 & 2)”, takes nine minutes and nine seconds to travel from the dark place the rest of the album comes out of to a line of encouragement (“You’re not alone, so keep on holding on”), by way of a Gilmour-indebted guitar phrase around 2:30 and a change of pulse at 4:15 that recalls eighties Pink Floyd. The trouble starts immediately after, because the record doesn’t end there. Tracks twelve and thirteen are radio edits of “My Blistering Mind” and “The Mandatory Prize”, two songs we have already heard in full, and they stretch to sixty-two minutes an album that had found its ending.
The “Smile, Smile, Smile” EP came out in June; of its three tracks, only the title song turns up here.
Rating: 7.8/10
Text by Guillem Cardós