FAIRY TALES

Spoken fairy tales with musical accompaniment: Isn't this the perfect match for progressive rock artists? I think so! The music created to support Gilli's accomplished and very professional rendering of three fairy tales is the best Gong music I've ever heard! The recording and engineering is almost perfect, with only a few issues between the voice track levels and those of the instruments, otherwise this is just a delightful album of melodies, musicianship, and creativity, with the bonus that it's all in support of these wonderful, meaningful stories.

1. "Wassalisa" (22:28) is musically my favorite thing Gong (in any of its incarnations and offsprings) has ever done. It's just mesmerizing! While Gilli's story is wonderful and theatric, there are times when the vocal track is mixed too low (or Gilli's voice modulates into lower volumes) so that her story gets lost in the music. This is acceptable mostly because the music is SO amazing, so engaging. In my third listen through I'm still having a terrible time trying to focus on the story because I am so in love with the music. It's like listening to Anthony Phillips' "Geese and the Ghost" for the first time (only with better sound production). Didier Malherbe is wonderful, but then so are the rest of the musicians. Great art! (9.5/10)

2. "The Three Tongues" (12:43) is a nice story with a good moral that is much better mixed with its musical accompaniment. The music here draws quite a bit from classical traditions with many sections featuring single instruments carrying the melody or weight of the theatric support--classical guitar, piano, steel-stringed guitars, oboe, Uilleann pipes, harp, keyboards, and, of course, plenty of woodwinds. The theatric incidentals used for sound effects and accents (including crowd noises) are amazing and add a great deal to the rendering. (10/10)

3. "The Pied Piper" (14:38) is sonically the most well-balanced song as well as the most confidently rendered story from the storyteller. The GENTLE GIANT/GRYPHON/circus-like music is my least favorite, least engaging, but is perfectly performed and makes the best theatric companion to Gilli's story. (Could they be partially improvised?) How much fun these professionals must have had making this album! (9.5/10)

Whether this music and album were created as a vehicle for children stories or Wagnerian-like operas, this is brilliant, masterful music; an album to hear, to fall in love with.