THE LOST FRONTIER

This album turned out to be a lot less than I had expected from the artwork. The songs are pleasant and unobtrusive. When Caroline LaFue is singing, I am reminded of mellow Mostly Autumn and Magenta at their simplest. The music is extremely well played,mostly because the songs are quite simplistic. The album design is beautiful and evokes thoughts of the English countryside and deep English history back to Roman times. But except for some Celtic instrumentation, it's a stretch to find the connection between Hadrians's wall and the music. The vocals are beautiful but unfortunately, only sparingly used. My major frustration with the album is that each song has only one melody/idea, which is embelleshed and worked up during the song. Usually one or two instruments hold up the melody, like the keyboard washes behind the folky accordian, or an acoustic guitar strum using three chords. There are no choruses or bridges between verses which would help maintain interest. The bass is almost nowhere to be found. The band uses every embelishment in the book - twittering birds, splashing water, even the sound of a creaky ox cart going by. Still, by the time the song is two minutes old, the melody has become a bore and one is left waiting for the end to come. Hopefully, they will have more ideas on later releases.