2014

No eclectic complex progressive rock on this album, just plain and simple straightforward melodic prog, but so well-played ! In fact, all instruments are played by Erik de Beer and it's hard to tell, which instrument he plays best. He plays all keyboards, lead guitars, basses, drums, flute and a colourful cheerful parade of all sorts of plucked instruments.

No long compositions full of complex rhythms and imaginative dramatic tempo changes. Here we have a very happy extremely melodic progressive rock, that every now and then is characterised by inclinations towards folk music. The album is mainly instrumental and I think it could easily have done without the few vocal contributions, even when well-executed, by Ankie Jansen and Marion Brinkman. All themes have already sufficient instrumental strenght. The often multi-layered lead guitar sounds beautiful and impressive, but most of all I liked the pumping sound of the Fender precision bass. The keyboard sounds, mainly done on Moog and Hammond, are fantastic, but perhaps the best moments on the album are made up by the acoustic instruments. The cheerful "Early Bird Waltz" with its gentle lutes and its bucolic mandolins, lutes and acoustic guitars, the introverted dreamy "Prelude to the future" with its beautiful 12 string guitar and the extremely dynamic "Second Flight", displaying all plucked instruments in less than two minutes are all little masterpieces in their way.

The rating on this album would be somewhere in between 3 and 4 stars, but the dynamics and the drive of this music are so contagious, that I decided on 4 stars !

Progpig66.