GYPSY

This had been another one of those ancient bands I've grown up with and actually still highly enjoy listening to nowadays every now and then. Gypsy never had been a band in the genuine Prog sense, not like ELP, Genesis, Yes or Crimson. Their music also hadn't been that much keyboard-dominated as the one by The Nice, Procol or early Rare Bird. If you imagine CSNY's vocal harmonies and guitar sound (just more rocking) combined with some ELO-type tasteful string arrangements, some nice Hammond sound and some gentle percussive rhythms (not that much the latin Santana-type ones) added then you might get a rough idea how they sounded like (at least on their first two releases). Their music had been usually highly harmonic, melodic with nice hook lines but not without having a certain degree of complexity thus it hardly becomes really boring even after repeated listens. Their first three albums have been reissued on CD whereas their fourth one is only available on vinyl but I doubt that the latter one is really worth hunting for, at least for Prog fans since "Antithesis" revealed already a more funky straight forward rock vein.

Their debut here in review, a double vinyl in its original release though should be rather interesting and enjoyable for collectors of early proto Prog. It contains a mixture of shorter (but not necessarily worse) and longer tracks of which "Dead and Gone" had received quite a lot of airplay in US stations despite its length of 11 min as I'm reading in some other review. That one doesn't appear to me being the strongest track actually and rather a bit lengthy but on the other hand we could be very happy if radio stations nowadays would play such songs, hard to imagine in our commercial times. Anyway there are enough other highlights here on this album like "Gypsy Queen Pt.1", "Dream If You can", "Late December", "Decisions", "More Time", "The Vision" or "Tomorrow Is The Last To Be Heard" to make up for worthy purchase. The rest of the tracks are good as well and in fact the only downer is the poor sound quality but keep in mind we're in 1970 and this record hadn't been produced under professional conditions.

As a summary I wouldn't consider this usually overlooked band an essential addition to a Prog collection in general but nonetheless their debut in particular might be interesting for any lover of early Prog records. Sound fetischists and Prog purists would be rather disappointed I guess. For me this one deserves a 4-stars rating though (but keep in mind this might be due to more personal and nostalgic reasons)!!