The second Red Sand album is built around two enormous pieces, each close to twenty minutes, with a short title track between them. It also brings in the singer who would front most of the band’s records for the next fifteen years.

The short version

Released in 2005, self-released on compact disc, with a 2008 remaster adding a bonus track. Simon Caron writes and plays guitar, and as on every Red Sand record the personnel around him turns over. Three pieces on the original issue. It is the album where the band’s long-form instincts reach their furthest — two of its three tracks run past eighteen minutes — and where its settled front man arrives.

A new singer, and two pieces near twenty minutes

Steff Dorval takes over on vocals here, and he becomes the band’s defining voice: he sings this album, the two after it, and the run of records from 2016 to 2021. Around Caron and Dorval the record has Pierre Massicotte on keyboards, Mathieu Gosselin on bass and Perry Angelillo on drums. The singer change is the important one — where the debut had Hëmel, everything from here through the band’s most productive years is Dorval — and the songs remain in English, as they do throughout the band’s catalogue.

The sound

Side-long, twin-epic neo-prog. The method is the debut’s, pushed further: Caron’s guitar leads, the keyboards support, and the writing unfolds at length rather than in songs. Two pieces near twenty minutes is an unusual amount of weight to hang on a single record, and it asks the listener to follow long developments rather than wait for choruses. Dorval’s voice is warmer and more present than the debut’s, and it changes the band’s centre of gravity without changing its method — the guitar still leads and the pieces still run long.

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The songs

‘Submissive’ opens the album at around eighteen minutes. The title track, ‘Gentry’, is the short piece at five minutes twenty-three. ‘Very Strange’ closes the original album at around nineteen minutes, the longest thing here. The 2008 remaster adds a further piece, ‘Prise de conscience’, whose French title is the one exception to the band’s English-language habit, and the 2005 issue also carries a shorter bonus, ‘The Voice’.

Reception and legacy

No chart placing or certification is documented. Progressive rock listeners rate it 3.74 out of 5 across 98 ratings on ProgArchives, below the debut but well regarded. No review by a named critic in a named publication has been traced. The two-version history — the 2005 original and the 2008 remaster with a different bonus track — is worth knowing, because a tracklist taken from one will not match the other. Neither the running times nor the bonus material line up between the two issues.

The verdict

Gentry is for listeners who found the debut’s long pieces the best thing about it, because this record is almost nothing but long pieces. The two near-twenty-minute tracks are the band at its most patient, and Dorval’s arrival gives them a stronger vocal anchor than the debut had, which matters more the longer a piece runs. It is a slightly harder record to love than Mirror of Insanity, precisely because it asks so much room of you, but it rewards the commitment. Come to it second, after the debut, and treat the two near-twenty-minute pieces as the whole point of the record rather than as an obstacle to it.

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