This is the first album of this essential group
of the first times of the progressive rock, and I believe that it was a world in if same
inside the panorama of the first ones 70, because they practiced a very own style.
Formation:
Colin Goldring, singer, guitars, recorders, saxophon tenor and harmonica.
Stewart Goldring, guitar soloist and voices
Peter Crowling, bass and cello
Nigel Pegrum, percussion, flute, oboe and piano.
I believe that this album is better than its second "Lady Lake", with
a sound but matter and full with shades. The group, in spite of practicing a rock of high
complexity, with long themes and full with variations, doesn't need keyboards like organs,
synthesizers or mellotrons, which are substituted by other instruments like saxos, oboes,
flutes, or cellos.
It is difficult to explain on that consists their music but I would say that has the
structural complexity of some Gentle Giant and can also remember them in parts
vowels very perfectionists, it is dark and dark as Van der Graaf Generator,
sometimes subtle sometimes overwhelming as King Crimson, some doses hard rockers
type Led Zeppelin or T 2, and finally I wonder if these uncles were not the
precursors of the RIO with this album. He remembers a little to all this but it
doesn't sound clearly to anything of it.
The four long themes of the album are of a complexity and a surprising instrumental
execution, they can sound very overwhelming and strident, to become suddenly very delicate
with acoustic passages with flute. These themes are "Long Live Man Dead",
"Snails", "Time and Space", and the but potent and hard
rocker "In Spite of Harry's Toe Nail", all fantastic ones.
The two remaining songs are very short, "Peter" is a very classic
theme with cello and flute, and "Who Spoke" it is a beautiful
ballad acoustics.
A great disk of a group that, if it had lasted but time, now serious considered one of
the big ones. The sound of the recording is not very good but neither it is it in other
albums like "Nursery Cryme" and it doesn't pass anything.
Ferran Lizana