VOYAGE OF THE ACOLYTE

Half a century ago, at the time Yes were taking their really productive sabbatical leave of 1975, Steve Hackett turned a two months break of his band Genesis into a chance to work on a solo debut of his own, namely Voyage Of The Acolyte, and certainly made good use of it.

The album opens under dense jazz-rock spitfire, supplied by the trio of Hackett with bandmates Mike Rutherford and Phil Collins (who was taking also an intensive fusion training with Brand X by then) as sidekicks on bass and drums repectively. Not the best moment of the album, to my taste at least, but a good appetizer anyway. Other rather uncook moment comes with A Tower Struck Down, a piece co-written with brother John that sounds like an outtake from The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway to me, yet a bit overdone with studio trickery.

The acoustic moments of both Hands Of The Priestess and The Hermit are filled with pure idyllic magic, being the cor anglais in the last one played by Robin Miller, who keeps spreading charm with his oboe in Star Of Sirius, a track sung by Collins alterning moods ranging from bucolic to hectic that brings back the fusion pyrotechnics, with better result this time around.

Shadow Of The Hierophant comes last (but not least) as the piece de resistance of the album. Of course, it all comes down to what you feel about iterative forms in this point. I don't want to reduce this to a superficial resemblance with other well-known pieces using that same technique. This works for me, and I think that's for good reasons: First, the impeccable sense of dynamics and ornamentation constructing over the repetition of rythmic patterns and chordal sequences. Second, the exquisitely ethereal vocals by Sally Oldfield, leading the way to a path not dissimilar to that opened a couple of years before by her brother, and confirmed at the time with Ommadawn.

I have to say that my rating comes, not from the algebraic sum of each track figures, but from the feeling that this album is excellent as a whole, because of its outstanding creative freedom, and its freshness.