Last Plane Out - Cautionary Tales (2025)

A couple of the singles off the album ‘Cautionary Tales’, which is released today, 28th November, by Last Plane Out and which is their second album, have already featured in NMC (‘All Fools’ Day’ and ‘Break the chain’) and we couldn’t help but notice the very high standard of writing and production of the duo’s songs, their propensity to find and sustain hooks, and how they somehow manage, unusually, to blend mainstream pop and soft prog; a concoction they call prog-pop.

Interesting, isn’t it, how both prog rock and punk, which usurped it in the late 1970s but didn’t finish it off altogether, have come over time to an accommodation with pop, which never goes away?

Their influences come from bands and artists as diverse as Genesis (and Peter Gabriel in his solo guise), David Bowie, Kate Bush and Elbow amongst many others. I occasionally hear Jethro Tull as well, especially on the track ‘Four Hundred Days’ on this album.

Their melancholic but highly tuneful ballads, many considering ageing and its effects (as they admit, “we’re not spring chickens” – but neither is your reviewer, guys), have struck a chord with fans, and ‘Cautionary Tales’ also touches upon other genres, including a folk influence and a few more up-tempo songs notably ‘Step out tonight’, which is even danceable!

I selected ‘The Butterfly Effect’ as the sample track initially for no other reason than that the concept has always fascinated me, arising out of Chaos Theory and suggesting that a tiny change in initial conditions in one state can cause large, unpredictable differences in a later state.

Chaos Theory is something I always aspired to, like Quantum Physics and Schrödinger’s cat. It is entirely logical. If I chose not to publish this review you wouldn’t read it and hence your life would be changed from if you did, which would have implications for everyone you know and everyone that knows them and…you could follow that line through until you go up your own back passage.

It’s like trying to imagine what the Universe is in, and what that’s in, like a series of babushka dolls.

So we are all intractably bound together and dependent on each other.

I don’t honestly know if guitarist and lyricist Anders Lundqist agrees with that statement or not, but I suspect he does:

“I just can’t stop believing/We’re all pieces of a plan/Put here on this planet to connect

Thoughts can be deceiving/Feel the slap of wings/Then await the butterfly effect”.

Although arguably the Butterfly Effect theory has everyone being nonlinear but let’s not go down that rabbit hole here!

What he does next is rather clever, personalising the concept into one of friendship and love.

“When I see you, I know that I can cope/But here is still so much for us to do

When I see you, I know that there is hope/The kindness of a stranger is a clue.”

The way this song is constructed and hung together is impressive, featuring a strong alto saxophone contribution from Klara Schmidtz – the only outsider to feature on this album, otherwise they play everything else themselves – and an equally forceful guitar input from Anders Lundqist, both of which gel perfectly with Nils Erikson’s gentle, restrained piano and which cumulatively are as effective in their own way as Hazel O’Connor’s and Wesley Magoogan’s ‘Will You’.