SILENT CRIES AND MIGHTY ECHOES

The undisguised Floydian influences that constantly hovered over Eloy's sonic universe find their greatest points of intersection in "Silent Cries and Mighty Echoes" (1979), a journey that attempts to explain the relevance of spirituality to transcendence as human beings, and the band's seventh album.

That "Astral Entrance" is a younger sister of father and mother to 'Shine on You Crazy Diamond' in its keyboards and introductory guitars is more than notorious, and that its follow-up "Master of Sensation" is a cousin of 'Sheep', or that guest Brigitte Witt flirts in the "b) The Vision Burning" section of the fantastic suite "The Apocalypse" with the screams of Clare Torry in 'The Great Gig in the Sky', or the lilting "Mighty Echoes" visits at times the farm of the 'Pigs (Three Different Ones)', reaffirm the place where Eloy sought to reflect.

But curiously, and in spite of such omnipresent influence, Frank Bornemann's band managed to create a place of their own and sound like themselves, a little less energised and more spatial than their British references, with Detlev Schmidtchen playing a leading role in building immense cosmic atmospheres from his artillery of keyboards and synthesizers, well amalgamated with Bornemann's arpeggiated guitars and sustained solos, as in the sections "a) Silent Cries Divide the Night" and "c) Force Majeure" of the aforementioned "The Apocalypse", in the intriguing weightlessness of "De Labore Solis", or in the melodic agility of "Pilot to Paradise", a track that also surpasses the average speed that the mid-tempos impose on the work.

"Silent Cries and Mighty Echoes" is undoubtedly a very good album, the third to repeat the line-up that released the most relevant works of the Germans in their space rock vein. At the beginning of the 80's, Eloy underwent a new recomposition of its members (both Schmidtchen and drummer Jurgen Rosenthal left the band), and with that also a rearrangement in their musical approach for the subsequent "Colours".

4 stars