DUST AND DREAMS

I was a teenager in the nineties, which perhaps makes me a little biased towards the music of that time. I don't mean that my favorite music is from that decade, because I favor the seventies a lot more. But the fact that I grew up in the nineties perhaps makes me find Dust and Dreams a little better than its two or three predecessors.

The concept I found it to be more interesting than Stationary Traveller. Not my favorite concept either, but interesting. As with The Snowgoose and Nude, I had to investigate the original story, since I had never read The Grapes of Wrath (English is not my native language and I am not an expert in American literature). And I must recognize that Andy Latimer did a very good job adapting the novel into a nice piece of music.

The songs, although none are lengthy epics, are to be understood within the whole concept of the album, so it wouldn't be fair to isolate them to make a track-by-track review. All I can say is that they serve their purpose well enough, some of the shorter ones serving, not necessarily as fillers, but as bridges to connect the different parts of the story. Perhaps for this reason, I am not able to highlight any specific track, but I must say songs like End of the Line, Rose of Sharon, Hopeless Anger, and instrumentals like Milk 'n Honey and Whispers in the Rain have good moments.

What really let me down in this album was the vocals. As I posted in the review of a previous album, I feel that Andy Latimer's voice fortunately improved as it matured. While it is true that vocals have never been Camel's strong point, they were gradually getting better with every release. But on Dust and Dreams, Camel (not only Latimer) took a huge step back. Take for example the signature track, End of the Line. I mean, what was Andy thinking? His voice sounds sadly unnatural, artificial. Even Rose of Sharon, which could have been a majestic song, lacked a truly powerful vocal melody, and the harmonies sound very forced and out of sync.

Too bad, since this was such a promising release. Fortunately, in the years that followed, some of the live performances that featured some of those songs would fix the vocal weakness of this album.