FOR BAILEY

I enjoyed Salander's Stendec album quite a bit, and I was glad to hear something new by them. This tribute piece commemorate's the life of a beloved dog, Bailey, and was commissioned by the grieving family. It begins with a woman calling, "Bailey! Bailey! Come on boy. Come here! Come here!" Bailey responds, and the music begins. The next seven minutes takes us on a cinematic journey of bittersweet remembrances of canine explorations, familial memories, and loss. While Dave Smith's keyboards initially focus on the fondly remembered romps through the countryside, Dave Curnow's emotive guitar reveals the grief this family is experiencing. The piece ends almost abruptly with a child's voice saying the dog's name, and we're reminded that, for this family, life will go on.

I've lost beloved pets, and I found the music completely in keeping with its purpose: to provide solace and to stimulate the release of grief. It's a nice piece.

If you aren't grieving, "For Bailey" warrants 3 stars for being largely a very melodic mood piece. If you are, then this will be of some comfort: 4 stars. I'm assigning 4 stars for this piece's target audience.

Review #12 I'm sad and glad at the same time to be able to say that this piece of music was recorded for our dog Bailey, a wonderful 4-year-old Golden Retreiver who died so young from cancer. The story goes like that: Me and my wife (who you can hear on the song) are hosting the internet radio show 'Prog & Roll' which both members of Salander are listening to on a frequent basis since September and on. (They even recorded a special song for our show's 2nd birthday).

Anyway... When Bailey passed away, we were really sad as you can understand, and we wanted to do something for his memory. At that point came to my mind Big Big Train's song 'Hedgerow' in the middle part, where there is someone whistling to his dog saying 'come here boy'. So I wrote them an e-mail, asking if they could record a small piece of music 1-2 minutes top, in order to make a small video for our dog.

They result was this 7.5 minute long piece, because let's face it, if you are a progger it's impossible to write something under 5 minutes long. :) The woman's voice you hear belongs to my wife, and the child's voice in the end is our son's. In case you don't understand what he is talking about, is because he speaks in Greek, saying something like 'mommy will feed him now'.

We don't have words to express our gratitude to Dave & Dave of Salander for the song they agreed to compose. For sentimental reasons, (but not only), I can't give nothing less than 4 stars. Thank you for reading