Ranking Every Single Camel Song

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   Ranking Every Camel Song Day 15: 34-31
I am back from a bit of a hiatus in which I was endlessly busy. 10-12 hour school days on top of 24 hour work weeks really just left me with pretty much no time to continue this project. However, since I got some free time right now, I'm gonna do my best to get the next few entries out semi-consistently. Lets pick up where we left off...
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34: Never Let Go (Camel)
Never Let Go is to many people, a landmark song for Camel. It's even a bit of a trademark title for the band spawning a live album with the same name (a very good one at that!). This track is very epic and proggy opening with a cool acoustic guitar passage that features one of the rare cases of Camel using the mellotron, which proves to be all over this track. It fizzles out before the full band kicks into the main verse/groove and I don't know what it is, but there's something so satisfying about the sound of the full band just turning it on like a light switch. The vocals come in accompanied by this very driving rhythm section, light organ playing and these melting electric guitar lines. This song packs a real memorable verse and hook, I love how it comes out of the first chorus with a sweet 12th fret guitar harmonic before very smoothly dropping into the second verse. For my money, it's the jam at 2:23 that really defines this song. It comes straight out of the second chorus with these sharp and steady guitar strums while the organ teases you in the background. We have this mellotron flute playing come in on top of a very solid rhythm section before switching back to the string mellotron tone which is used as a very earthy and pretty lead instrument briefly. The ending playout and guitar solo of this song gives me chills with soaring mellotrons and vocals creating a very full sound. A great track and one that is deservedly held to high esteem.
33: Ice (I Can See Your House From Here)
And already I'm sure many people wish I never started this list back up again with this placement. While this song may come in towards the tip top of your personal lists, keep in mind that this is still well into the upper echelon of my ranking here. Ice is a very unique instrumental piece of music and it really opened the door to a new style of extended and very emotive guitar solo based tracks that the band would continue to explore on following albums. It opens with very subtle instrumentation with Kit Watkins piano and Andy Latimers more clean guitar working together to introduce the main theme. After about a minute and a half the drums come in sweeping us into a very smooth and floating 6/4 groove with some very free-flowing electric piano details all over the place. Latimer comes in with what has now become a very signature sharp tone as the rest of the band plays around him. Kit Watkins gets a solo and as usual uses some of those unmistakable Kit Watkins tones you hear all over his works with Happy the Man and on the song Wait. The amount of "feel" in this song is in the stratosphere, and the music really comes to life because of just how in tune everybody is with each other. The keyboard solo gives a slight hint of what's about to come, ultimately building up some slight tension before Latimer explosively begins one of his most epic solos ever kicking it off with the theme from the introduction, this time in a much more upscale and grand fashion with every member working hard to set the stage for Latimer to unleash everything he's got. I love how this solo ends fading away (likely into the heavens) as this very strange and earthy keyboard tone fills the void before this very melancholic acoustic and clean guitar duet begins closing the track on a very interesting and sorrowful note. I think this is a great piece of music, unfortunately it comes in on my least favorite Camel album and I think in turn, I don't reach for this song as often as the songs ranked above this on the list. Which is a shame, because every time I do revisit the studio version I'm always amazed and I always pick up on new details.
32: The Final Encore (Rajaz)
This isn't a track that I see mentioned very often, but I think it's awesome and very dynamic. Right out the gate the intro to this song is absolutely stomping with these very menacing guitar and choir lines, it's almost a bit psychedelic actually. This song is like a ghostly tour through the desert with tons of different sounds and passages throughout. Coming out of the intro, you hear these sharp strings briefly play through a very symphonic sounding arrangement before Latimer drops this amazing and somewhat quirky middle eastern sounding motif with one of the fattest guitar tones I've ever heard. The echoing voice of Latimer comes in opening with the line "After Words, and Long Goodbyes" of course referencing Stationary Traveller. I usually don't jive with self referential stuff in music, but this is such a cool nod to the past without being too crude about it. I also gotta say, there is something very brooding about how Latimer sounds on this track, his voice sounds like it's thundering down from the clouds. Instruments are seamlessly layered on top of one another as the song progresses featuring some unique middle eastern percussion choices throughout. At 4:04 the main chorus melody from the following track "Rajaz" is beautifully introduced and looking at the bigger picture, this gives the album a great sense of cohesion. It comes back around into that main groove now with Latimer soloing on top of it. In the last two minutes we get a beautiful payoff with highly orchestrated instrumentation reminiscent of lots of the material on Harbour of Tears. The general tone of the track flips into a more bright and hopeful feel, I always think of this song as the first several minutes being the desert at night, while these final two minutes are like the sunrise and start of a new day. I'll use the word quirky again to describe this section, some of the tones used sound a little bit dated. Mostly the weird percussive shaker tone they use, but if you ask me some of those cheaper sounding tones are just part of the Camel Productions era charm. In the last minute Latimer drops one more nasty head-bobbing guitar solo before the keys close out the track. I'm not sure where most people would rank this song, but I love it. It's a very interesting and unconventional piece of music and it's songs like these that give me a high level of respect for Rajaz, rather than ride a nostalgia wave, Camel continued to try something new with every single album well into the 90s and 2000s.
31: Skylines (Rain Dances)
Skylines is a great, bouncy instrumental on the latter half of Rain Dances with sweet dueling synth and guitar leads from Bardens and Latimer respectively. It has a pretty steady and fast paced bass line fading the track in and it remains mostly constant throughout the track. Throughout this track there's fantastic melodies on all fronts starting off with the guitar. The motif it kicks into at 1:00 is just pure ectasy with some really nice electric piano and saxophone subtleties from Bardens and Collins. Keeping the high energy, Bardens takes over with a glorious synth solo boasting a fantastic and unique tone as usual. There's a lot of really neat and playful instrumental shifts accompanying this section as well. His extended solo leads right back into that sweet aforementioned guitar motif/chorus before Bardens and Latimer come together to trade off some soling to close out the track. Though this song is a little shorter and maybe not as dense as some of the previous entries on this list, I think it's a great song that comes and does it's thing really well. It's always one of my favorite parts of Rain Dances.
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The List So Far:
(Best)
Skylines
The Final Encore
Ice
Never Let Go
Straight to my Heart
Separation
Drafted
Six Ate
Mystic Queen
Supertwister
Wing and a Prayer
Friendship/Migration/Rhayader Alone
Slow Yourself Down
Spirit of the Water
Beached
Curiosity
Under the Moon/Watching the Bobbins
Squigely Fair
Arubaluba
Shout
Fox Hill
The Last Farewell (Birthday Cake/Nudes Return)
Storm Clouds/Cotton Camp/Broken Banks
Aristillus
Running From Paradise
Cobh/Send Home the Slates
Changing Places
Sasquatch
Long Goodbyes
Captured
For Today
You Are The One
Vopos
Docks
Starlight Ride
Hopeless Anger/Whispers in the Rain
Tell Me
Simple Pleasures
Irish Air/Irish Air (Reprise)/Harbour of Tears
The Miller's Tale
Elke
Generations/Eyes of Ireland
Refugee
Summer Lightning
City Life/Nude
Landscapes
Cloak and Dagger Man
No Easy Answers
Dust Bowl/Go West/Dusted Out
You Make Me Smile
Wait
Lies
End of the Day
Missing
West Berlin
One Of These Days I’ll Get an Early Night
Rose of Sharon/Milk and Honey
Down on the Farm
The Hour Candle
Mother Road/Needles
Highways of the Sun
Pomp and Circumstance
Reflections
Who We Are
Selva
Camelogue
Please Come Home
Pressure Points
Eye of the Storm
Fingertips
Todays Goodbye
After Words
Heroes
Sheet Rain/Whispers/Little Rivers and Little Rose
Manic
Neon Magic
The End of the Line
Hearts Desire/End Peace
Rain Dances
Rainbows End
The Homecoming
Your Love is Stranger Than Mine
Remote Romance
(Worst)