THE DREAM SOCIETY

The last of my reviews of later day Roy Harper albums, The Dream Society (1998) seems like Roy's response to his previous album Death or Glory. However, unlike that work, The Dream Society is a rambling album of disconnected themes and topics, while being true to Harper's persona, doesn't connect well with this listener.

The first two songs are Harper singing about how much he wants to return to love. Noble, but trite in both lyrics and melody. The third song Muriel is an ode to Harper's mother who passed away when he was quite young. It starts off as a parody of the old folk song The Cotton Fields Back Home before shifting gears into a slow tempo tome about his late mother. The song's transformation is awkward to me in more ways than one. Harper than goes through a suite of pure hard rock songs that are good in themselves but are hardly prog and could have used the talents of his buddies Page or Gilmour to bolster them. Of these, Angel Of The Night is the best and could have fit easily on Harper's superb IQ album form 1975. The title track is one of Harper's best songs in the that it's dreamy acoustic verses set up majestic hard hitting riffing and and extraordinary vocals from Harper in the son's powerful choruses. Broken Wing is another fine song, a touching acoustic ballad that only Harper could compose and perform. However, the final song on the album, These Fifty Years, is a ponderous folk prog song that eschews melody in favor of Roy's overlong verbiage. The inclusion of prog god Ian Anderson on flute does little to improve it.

The sound quality of the album is excellent and is probably Harper's most contemporary sounding album, but it's difficult for me to recommend this album to anyone but completists. For harper's 90s output, I would recommend Roy's 1990 album Once over The Dream Society as it contains some of Roy's most focused, if somewhat restrained, works. Better yet is Harper's 1992 tour d' force Death Or Glory?