3

This double LP album by Focus is mostly very good. It is progressive hard rock with many mellow parts. The album is mostly instrumental. The keyboards are vintage: ambient & rhythmic organ overload, melodic piano and a few harpsichord parts. The organ is sometimes quite dirty and distorted. The usual excellent flutes Thijs Van Leer uses to play are omnipresent: some are delicate and tender like Camel used to play in the 70's, and others sound more nervous and dynamic like the ones on the Jethro Tull's "Thick as a brick" album. The refined drums do a very good job. Jan Akkerman plays TONS of melodic & hard rock electric guitar solos, which can be recognized among 100 other guitarists' solos. Jan Akkerman plays many excellent & refined acoustic guitar melodies. He uses a smooth pedal volume effect on the "Answers? Questions! Questions? Answers!" track. The complex and impressive "Carnival fugue" has some jazz rock tendency a la ELP, especially the piano. The 6 first minutes of "Anonymous two (Part 1)" are excellent; unfortunately, everything suddenly stops, and then there is a lengthy monotonous guitar & bass bit, which causes the track to restart too slowly: when it is well restarted, Akkerman plays a long Zappa- esque guitar solo. "Anonymous 2 (Conclusion)" contains a lengthy drums solo, which takes again too much time to start: I find it not very spectacular. The Tull-esque "House of the King" was the music theme of the Quebec city TV series "De tout de tous", if I remember well.