TERPANDRE

1981, well, usually not much good is said of the prog rock scene. GENESIS gave us "Abacab", which finds them moving even further away from prog (but having the then- new MTV embrace them), KING CRIMSON reunited with a new lineup (Fripp, Bruford, Belew, Levin), and gave us "Discipline", which had more in common with the TALKING HEADS than anything they came up with from 1969-74, which while welcomed by many prog rock fans, alienated a few others.

Then there was this little known one-shot band from France, TERPANDRE. Here's what really happened, the band actually recorded this album in 1978, in a time where the prog rock scene was in decline, but still had room for a few good prog albums. Punk and disco was on the rise, so the album was rejected by all the labels they went to (they even tried for ECM - big time contemporary jazz label, but they deemed it "too electronic" for their image), until in 1981, they found a small, local label (in Lyon) called Dionysos, and had the album released in April of that year. This is an all instrumental prog album that leans to the romantic side, piles with tons of great Mellotron all over and nice use of Mini Moog. There is also some fusion tendencies in the Jean-Luc PONTY vein (especially since the band included Patrick Tilleman on electric violin, who was obviously influenced by PONTY). But the album gets bogged down by being too overly dramatic in places for my liking, and there are a few unnecessarily slow spots on the album preventing me from calling it a classic, but it's still an album worth having.