CIRCLES IN TIME

I am always excited to see a new John Holden project; his compositions and productions are almost unparalleled in terms of quality and scholarly sincerity.

1. "Avalanche" (6:18) a very polished, professional YES/Neo Prog opening with some amazing drumming (thanks, Nick D'Virgilio!) and awesome guitar play lead into a very theatric Jean Pageau (MYSTERY) vocal set within a very stage-appropriate soundscape. In the fourth minute we get a little keyboard-centered interlude before returning to main vocal themes, but the at 4:25 we're off into another, more serious, instrumental passage. Nice soli all around from LA session guitarist Eric "Potz" Potapenko and John's keys. My favorite song on the album. (9/10)

2. "High Line" (6:58) led by an excellent, emotional vocal by prog journeyman and devotee, Peter Jones (Progzilla, The Colin Tench Project, Red Bazaar, Barock Project, Tiger Moth Tales, Cyan, Camel, etc.) A solid song; my second top three song. (13/15)

3. "The Secret of Chapel Field" (7:36) a spacious, simply constructed and arranged song created to accompany a father-daughter ballad as performed by Sally Minnear and Marc Atkinson (Mostly Autumn, Nine Stones Close, Riversea). Guitars, piano, violin, mandolin, double bass, and synth strings make sparse contributions to airily accompany the lovers tale. Very theatric. Marc's performance as the father feels much more invested, genuinely emotional, than that of Sally as the daughter. The music is quite lovely--especially in the passages that fill space between the vocals. My other top three song. (13.25/15)

4. "Dreams of Cadiz" (5:17) classical-sounding piano--sounding very much like the stage showy stuff that Liberace would perform--opens this before stepping out in lieu of Oliver Day's multiple tracks of Spanish guitars. Piano returns with guitar accompaniment, and the two take turns dancing with the lead, sometimes at the same time, while bass and hand drums lend intermittent support. Electric instruments and jazzy drum kit join in for the final 90 seconds. Impressive but, is this prog? (8.75/10)

5. "Circles" (5:47) piano and acoustic guitar accompany Sally Minnear (on multiple tracks supporting herself) for the first 90 seconds. Bass and incidental synth sounds joins in for the second verse and then programmed drums and percussion and more synths are added for an instrumental passage. Enter drums and the soundscape fills and broadens out a bit, but then we strip back down to bare bones for the third verse. At 4:20 drums, electric bass, and other synth-generated sounds fill more of the field as Sally sings the chorus. We end with a simple version, bringing us back to the beginning. Cute, enjoyable, and innocuous but nothing to write home about. (8.5/10)

6. "KV62" (19:23) a truly theatric epic about the discovery of the tomb of the Egyptian Pharoah Tuth-Ank-Amon. It's gorgeous and definitely ordered as a sequential narrative with great performances from vocalists Pete Jones and That Joe Payne, Vikram Shankar's piano, and John's keyboard orchestration. It is, however, in this latter department that the song falls short, I'm afraid, as either the computer keyboards John had access to during the recording were inferior to some of the modern sample/replicators or else he should have hired the real orchestra to perform the score as he tried to do on his computer keyboard. I appreciate the scoring and effort to carefully realize the orchestral parts on keyboard, but it just doesn't measure up to the real thing. Then there is the fact of so few emotional high points in the song--it seems to travel along at one and the same pace and energy level from start to finish--which is something no one would expect from a prog epic. And the talents of those enlisted within the 20- minute piece are sadly under-utilized. (32/40)

Total Time 51:19

I have to admit that I'm disappointed with this new release of John's. I'm not really sure that this is prog rock-- especially as rock drum kit, electric bass, electric guitar, and electric synths are absent over fully 50% of this music. While the quality of his compositions and engineering are top notch, I'm not as drawn back to the songs of this album as much as with his previous two albums.

B-/3.5 stars; a collection of well-composed and impeccably-produced theatricities; just not up to proggy par of John's previous albums.