SKY 2

"Instrumental classically-orientated double album", to these ears, automatically triggers a kind of weary wince: I'll praise the technical competence on display, and politely ask to skip to the last track. In the dim light of this, "Sky 2" is very much a pleasant surprise. Instrumental albums are often highly prone to slipping into the pretty yet sterile void; however flawless their execution, their conception struggles to attain thematic or philosophical significance that even the most sparsely-penned phrases can conjure up. This is the second most fatal error such albums make. More fatal still is homogeneity of noodle, where even the most defensible passage could be shifted by the unscrupulous editor to two-thirds of the way through a different song, with all but the most obsessive listener failing to bat an eyelid. To summarise, while Sky's second falls for the former (any Marxist critic looking for pedagogic or moral meaning in this record will be intensely disappointed; it's effectively a collection of 13 discrete, entertaining exercises in music, not a work of art per se), it avoids the latter superbly. A breathless overview of contents identifies a surprisingly hard-edged opener, repeatedly alternating between guitar- led theme and individual solo freakout (warning: solo freakout fans might be underwhelmed, but Sky are all classical musicians at heart), slow-building ditty in 5/4, slow-burning Arabic-infused masterpiece, the 17-minute-long one where we've given up 7 minutes in (there are some decent moments thereafter but not nearly enough), an unfunny tuba pun which still makes the music look good, a couple of variations on "traditionals" arranged for classical guitar, a couple too many variations on a Rameau Gavotte, some dreadful marimba garden thing, something stolen from Curved Air that, to be fair, sounds amazing, 12 frivolous minutes (although I absolutely love the idea of "Parts 1&2 running at the same time") that typify the slightly smug sterility of the whole album, and the famous one to end, which is still my favourite classical adaption of all time, and deserves to be very widely heard. So?Peek's influence seems to be the most inspired; Monkman's a little hit and miss. Not all of it works, and if this album were trimmed of its shorter softer notes, and the second half of Fifo, to a single vinyl, we'd be looking at a masterpiece. As things stand, 3.5 stars seems apt (argh!). I'm going to tentatively round this up, on the grounds that an album being bloated with a couple of weak songs is far more easily remedied (through judicious skipping) than one lacking a couple of strong songs and, for an instrumental double album in the "Eclectic Prog" section, which would usually signal a mixture of weariness and apprehension for me, this is probably as nice as it gets.