THE WINDOW OF LIFE

With the addition of 'The Fallen Dreams and Angels' EP on the Pendragon Toff Records version of the cd you can't ask for much more! I wish I had known that before buying 'The Fallen Dreams and Angels'/'As Good As Gold' cd. One of the things that I like about 'The Window of the World' album is the fact that the music doesn't sound overtly Neo-Progressive if you can understand what I mean. RPI is really more my style. I'm not a big Neo-head although I do have a number of Neo cd's in my collection to round it off. It's not that I don't like Neo, it's just not my fav. category.

Now with that said, getting to the heart of the review. Plagiarism, as defined by Webster's Standard Dictionary: 'misappropriation of the works or ideas of another'. It's hard not to say that there are at least 4 specific places where this definition could apply. The opening of 'The Walls of Babylon' does have a distinct Pink Floyd 'Shine on You Crazy Diamond' essance to it and not long after that you can distinctly hear early PG era Genesis. They are both to some extent suspect, although it would seem to me to be accidentally possible but when lyrics are used nearly verbatim, well that is to me another story altogether. There are 2 near lyrical quotes that are backed by nearly the original melody as well. First in 'The Walls of Babylon' there is a near direct quote of the Supertramp song 'Hide in your Shell' from their classic album 'Crime of the Century'. Secondly, there is also a very close, though not perfect lyrical quote in 'The Last Man on Earth' of the Moody Blues song 'New Horizons' from the album 'Seventh Sojourn'. These two quotes jumped right out at me as I, to some extent, grew up with the music of these two groups. They also use a slight stretch of a reference to ELP with some lyrics in 'The Last Man on Earth' and one might be able to discern the famous opening Supertramp 'School' harmonica riff in this song also. I must say that I find it difficult to believe that a group with as obvious of talents as Pendragon would find this to be necessary and thus I believe, and I have been wrong before, that this is actually a conscience effort to show reverance to a few of the groups that came before them and were influential on their music and musical tastes. Once again, I could very well be wrong and I just wasted the past 45 minutes hunting down the reference to the Moody Blues song on my cd's not to mention the hour and a half of one finger typing to createw this review and it was all just a terrible accident of the sub-conscience intruding in on the consciece act of composition. Oh well, we may never know for sure, but I stand by my hypothesis as a viable answer.

Anyway, with all that, I still really like this album a lot! It's nearly a perfect album IMHO, even better than the acclaimed 'The Masquerade Overture'. I give it a solid 4.4999 repeating. Enjoy God's gift of music!

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