IN SEARCH OF THE LOST CHORD

At some point of my early venture in the prog world, I thought that the Moody Blues was the best band that ever existed. And I only knew about them after all the classics, so it was not a matter of not knowing the other stuff. It was just that their sound cliqued and everything sounded like a masterpiece. Nowadays, not quite. Yet, remembering the time that the albums were made, they were quite progressive and great at crafting songs, pop and experimental.

In Search of The Lost Chord, their second album, is one of the best. It is dated, because it has a lot of Indian influences, lots of songs with sitar. It is also very psychedelic, with a homage to Timothy Leary (the LSD guru) and some experimental ideas that were trademark of that time, as in House of Four Doors and The Best Way to Travel. There are also some songs that had some of Moodies trademark, which was being psychedelic, even prog, but never losing some of the "beat sound".

With the orchestra of their debut gone (mostly for good, since they aptly replace the most important with Mellotron, flutes and cello, and leave out the cheesy instrumental interludes of their debut, the band boasts 30 instruments played in the credits, but the sound is not so full as one would expect. Guitar, bass, drums, mellotron and flute are all around, but the other instruments are sparsely used. Mostly in the clever "House of Four Doors" which pays homage to the old musical styles and point to the psychedelic "Legend of a Mind" as the future of music. This "mini-suite" is certainly one of the highlights of the album, along with Om, which is the most explicitly indian flavored song of their career, but very beautiful.

The other songs are a mix of spoken poetry, nice beat/psychedelic rockers and lush ballads with mellotron and flute (some include some exotic instrumentation, beautiful short instrumental passages or psychedelic quirks. They are all nice, but dated in a negative way (nice playing, but the resulting sound being less than the sum of individual efforts). The fact that they also don't show a lot of varieties in their influences make the experience a bit less rich than their counterparts in 1968 and 1969.

Even so, it is still a great album, especially for 1968, and one of the best in Moody Blues career.