E-Mail This Article to a Friend Back to the future Nektar return with their prog rock intact BY BRETT MILANO

Hearing the new Nektar album Evolution (on their own Dream Nebula/Eclectic Discs label) is a bit like listening to a communication from another planet. Of course, like all the best prog-rock bands that turned up in the mid ’70s, Nektar, who play the Regent Theatre in Arlington this Friday, have always sounded that way.

To these ears, Nektar’s music will forever be associated with the radio station where I first heard it. Anyone who lived near NYC in the 1970s will probably remember the late Allison Steele, better known as "The Nightbird," who held down the midnight shift on WNEW FM (alas, it’s now a cookie-cutter classic-rock station). Blessed with eclectic musical taste, a new-age bent, and one hell of a seductive voice, Steele would invite you to "come fly with me" at the start of each show, and her cosmic tangents would be the perfect set-up for the concept albums she was fond of playing — exotic European outfits like Nektar, Triumvirat, and Premiata Forneria Marconi were among her faves. Lou Reed noted around this time that you’d get your life saved if you turned on a New York station one fine morning, but Steele and her prog rock did the trick for those of us who turned on the same station at night.

From the sound of things, Nektar are still operating in the same netherworld. The new disc opens with a long, swirling fade-in — purposely similar to the one on their most popular album, 1974’s Remember the Future (just reissued on Dream Nebula) — before the band crash in with stormy, Floydian chords. "Out here the stars are still shining," announces singer/guitarist Roye Albrighton after a long instrumental intro, as the eight-minute "Camouflage to White" shifts into a spacy funk setting. On their first new disc in a quarter-century (with three-quarters of the original line-up, bassist Derek "Mo" Moore having retired), the reunited band go for a more modern sound, toning down the synth effects of old and putting guitars up front. It’s a natural transition, since Nektar were always more Beatles-influenced than many of their peers. The songs are all under 10 minutes (though in most cases just barely), and the pro-ecology theme of the lyrics is more salient than on those ’70s recordings. Even so, the band are largely untouched by time or trends. And the overall sense of wonderment — which defines prog rock at least as much as the extended instrumentals and the sci-fi themes — is intact.

Nektar’s return is a story in itself. The band were inactive for decades, most members living in England. But drummer Ron Howden lived in Hoboken for a while and even played in the indie-pop band Tiny Lights. Then frontman Albrighton survived a near-fatal liver infection. While recovering, he had the revelation that he was meant to play music again. "I was told a transplant would take four days, but I wound up being unconscious for two weeks," he recalls over the phone from England. "While I was under heavy sedation, a lot of ideas started coming at me. And when I finally did pull through, I remember the moment where I said, ‘I know what I’m going to do now. And I’m going to do it with my best friends, which is the rest of the band.’ " The near-death experience was of course turned into a concept album: though in essence a solo effort, The Prodigal Son was released as a Nektar disc in Europe two years ago in advance of the full band’s reunion.

Nektar made their US comeback at 2002’s prog-themed NEARFest (Northeast Art-Rock Festival) in New Jersey; a live DVD came out of that gig. All the same, Albrighton is reluctant to link the band with that movement. "People like the idea of progressive rock, but they don’t like it when you really ‘go off on one,’ if you know what I mean — that’s why we didn’t go off and do a 20-minute song on the album." He also points out that many themes on old Nektar albums that seemed purely drug-inspired were actually more Earth-centered. "We had to work really fast in the ’70s; the label wanted five albums in two years, so we were under some different kinds of influences. But we were also concerned with the abuse the planet was going through, which certainly hasn’t changed. That’s why we did things like Journey to the Center of the Eye [the band’s 1972 debut], where the astronaut is saying, ‘Hey, I can see everything that’s going on down there.’ "

If the NEARFest DVD (available through Eclectic) is any indication, the band’s show at the Regent should have plenty of the old otherworldly grooves. Since their tour mates, Caravan, are being held up by visa problems, Nektar will get more than two hours on stage, which should be time to play epics like "Recycled" and "Tab in the Ocean" in their side-long glory.

Nektar perform this Friday, September 10, at the Regent Theatre, 7 Medford Street in Arlington; call (781) 646-4849.