In The Can

Early-'70s U.K. prog rockers Flash might have had a Yes-like sound, but they had a good reason: band leader Peter Banks had been Yes's founding guitarist. Flash's 1972 debut album yielded the surprise Top 40 hit "Small Beginnings," and the band's complex-but-visceral sound seemed set to make them major players in the prog scene. Instead they split in '73, after their third album, Out of Our Hands. Yet their second LP, In the Can, shows that Flash were right on par with their peers. This album is dominated by three extended pieces. On the first record, another erstwhile Yes man, Tony Kaye, contributed keyboards, but here Flash maximize their guitar/bass/drums lineup, creating an impressive array of textures and shifting seamlessly through dynamics and time signatures. Banks in particular emerges as an endlessly inventive player, capable of fancy fretwork but also skilled at using effects pedals for a broad tonal palette. Colin Carter's airy vocals lend an appropriately ascendant feel to the band's ambitious art-rock epics.