SPRING

The players of this band certainly paint some beautiful visions with both string and flute Mellotrons. The album opens in calm feelings, which are surely one of the main characteristics of this record. I considered "The Prisoner (Eight By Ten)"as a quite common symphonic rock tune of early 1970's. The following "Grail" has a happy and relieved feeling, following the atmospherics of the first song quite much. There are some nice composed instrumental sections to be found from it too. On the basis of these two first tracks, I thought that this album resembles Greenslade's first album, but the next tracks move then to different directions. "Boats" is a short folky tune with a nice melody, morphing in an annoying style as "Shipwrecked Soldier", which is then a bluesy rock song with some marching patterns and nasal vocals. This song resembles quite much Black Widow's second album's sounds. "Golden Fleece" continues the slight relaxed bluesy style. The start of this track relies much to singing, and the composition isn't very complex, until nice a guitar solo comes out, and some nice composed material for the Mellotrons follows. "Inside Out" is quite primitive bluesy tune, basically ok, but not very interesting in my opinion. The middle section of the song has some kind of "progression of the Christmas elves" section, which was hilarious though stupid. "Song to Absent Friends (The Island)" is a short but beautiful and longing minor ballad for piano and voice, maybe the most pleasing song here, which is a surprise as I like Mellotrons very much. "Gazing" ends the original LP, and it starts as a fine solemn hymn, but moves soon back to the light and calm feelings characterizing this album. The chorus is still very beautiful and the Mellotrons paint fine contrasts on it.

There are three bonus tracks on the CD version which I managed to get for myself. Acquiring the original vinyl would seem as more expensive solution, as I saw it on a local second hand vinyl shop for ridiculous several hundred euros price. From these extra tracks "Fools Gold" is a nice number with fuzzed guitars on the chorus, giving a little stronger contrast to otherwise softer parts of the song. This performance follows the stylistic line of the original album tracks, and the end section has an interesting instrumental part included in it. "Hendre Mews" opens with hard guitars which bring to it more character than the rest of the tracks have in my opinion, but the song evolves soon to more basic bluesy direction, returning still time to time back to the fuzzed section. Otherwise the track is quite good, but there is an annoying fade out ending included. "A World Full of Whispers" is the last track, and is an uninteresting country-like rant for acoustic guitar and one yeller.

I liked the sounds and style of this album to some extent, but maybe the compositions are not very exciting, and I didn't like the way of singing. The overall feeling felt also as bit too light for immersing my mind to the album. The lyrics were more thoughtful than in an average rock records usually are however. If you like Mellotrons and classic British progressive rock of early 1970's, I recommend to give this classic a listen.