Imagine you’re listening to a song about famine and instead of despair, it gives you hope. And not, like, Coldplay hope. Actual, data-driven, Steven Pinker-style hope. That’s “Great Escape Famine,” the second track on Transgalactica’s upcoming album Onwards and Upwards, and the middle child of their “Great Escape” trilogy which, by the way, sounds less like a prog-rock suite and more like a failed Elon Musk Mars program.
The premise: take four themes from Prokofiev’s violin concertos, stitch them together into a prog-rock framework, and somehow make it work. It’s the kind of idea that should be insufferable and yet, it’s kind of brilliant. The track moves like a Rube Goldberg machine powered by melody: every phrase triggers another with improbable precision, tumbling through time signatures and harmonic pivots as if complexity were an Olympic sport. You can practically hear the gears turning, each instrument locked into some intricate counterpoint that shouldn’t groove but absolutely does.
Every bar feels dense enough to analyze for weeks, with instrumentation ricocheting through dissonant intervals, the bass plays as if it’s solving a riddle in real time, and the drums are less a rhythm section than a rolling argument about what rhythm even is. It’s music that rewards both obsession and surrender: the more you try to untangle it, the more it coils back into something defiantly musical.
And, yes, the song is literally about famine. Or rather, the lack of it. Steven Pinker once wrote that humanity’s struggle to feed itself has mostly been solved, except in the places where politics are terrible which, to be fair, is still a pretty big asterisk. Transgalactica take that idea and turn it into something oddly triumphant. It’s like if a PowerPoint about global food distribution suddenly burst into a soaring guitar solo.
The masterminds behind this are Tomasz and Filip Bieroń; a father-son duo from Poland who are basically Rush if Rush were obsessed with linguistics instead of Ayn Rand. Tomasz, a literary translator who’s worked on everyone from Woolf to Eco, writes music that sounds like it has citations. Filip brings the keyboard wizardry. Together, they’ve built a sound that’s equal parts “prog-rock odyssey” and “PhD dissertation set to 4/4 time.”
Their debut Better Angels already dipped its toes into rational optimism and musical moral philosophy, including a song warning you that listening to cheesy music might condemn you to it for eternity. (Honestly? Fair.) But “Great Escape Famine” is more confident, more cohesive, and somehow even nerdier, which I mean as the highest possible compliment.
With Chilean vocalist Lukky Sparxx now joining the lineup, Transgalactica are edging toward something like a Philosophy of Science: The Musical. It’s absurd, it’s ambitious, and it’s surprisingly fun. “Great Escape Famine” shouldn’t work but it does, spectacularly. It’s progressive rock for people who think graphs about world hunger are inspiring. And, against all odds, it kind of rules.
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About the Author
A tenured media critic known working as a ghost writer, freelance critic for publications in the US and former lead writer of Atop The Treehouse. Reviews music, film and TV shows for media aggregators.
