MARTIN ROAD

Writing about music is a challenge. It must first be forced to imagine that the word can mean the sound, the verb is able to account for the most elusive part of the music. For my part, often the words escape me, I must hurry before I could no longer write. But writing about music Ken Baird seems easy as I am overwhelmed by some of these melodies, major chords being aware of their divine nature. I immediately felt an irresistible sympathy for this sumptuously romantic, shimmering and undulating like a caterpillar in its skin colored music. This is a funfair in sensitive souls is what you will but it is elsewhere. It can leave traces melodic mixed with our blood, diluted in our eyes, our gestures, an integral part of ourselves.

So far, the work of Ken Baird enrolled in this open space with purity resonance echo left by the irresistible melodies. After the final agreement, there were "the most precious good of man" (silence from the ancient Greeks), but for a few seconds the music was still running in space as a magic item, the invading the haunted and inhabited it unfolded. This pure generated by the guitar just to be quiet, but has not yet been covered by silence sound object, produced alone this kind of voltage setting from which happens to the desire of the listener to enter in harmony with the world.

Over the Canadian album emerged a personality of its own. The tribute too respectful of August (1996), pretty card followed by Fields (1998), a true claim of a challenging and explosive style, genius and originality of Mike Oldfield has never ceased to be honored. Orion (2000) was a very curious interstellar navigation ethers Oldfieldienne guitars, sweating under sumptuous symphonies inherited from the Renaissance group. The perfect expression of the soul as an attitude of survival.

Having decided to leave a little aside the dazzling and enthusiastic prog, invited the lovely Sue Fraser no longer sure some discrete interventions voice, and dropped the most memorable quotes, Ken Baird was finally able to reach his fourth album. The man kept his promises announced at the output of the previous album, brilliant but too short (37 minutes soaking wet). Martin Road flirts with the minimum required laser era, but the errors are also more numerous. Especially for those who believe that Cat Stevens is not exactly a paragon of progressive. Because in the end, a collection of delicious closest sophisticated rhymes Fields we get that great epic of flights of Orion. Obviously, we can assume that the demanding amateur loses the passage and only the onlooker prog find excellent visit. But despite its relative simplicity, Martin Road is further evidence of the melodic genius of its author. On this disc, this very song is supported by an elegant musical work, where instruments are expressed in great harmony in the utmost courtesy. Sometimes the songs are still rattling against each other but remaining perfectly balanced. Martin Road is not a work of art, it is a work on a human scale, warm, fascinating and uncompromising. Its purpose has no other ambition than to describe states of mind in half shade. No more complex than the lives of everyone. But not less.

We can say all the bad things you want in this album, it is a little was that Ken Baird Azure Golden Renaissance, a beautiful but disturbing to distance (or even break) with the progressive. Times of major weaknesses we deplore (a "This Old Boat" which never ceases to sink) and false unnecessary extensions ("Victoria Day"). We can say what we want but ... Ah! the voluptuous sound of this guitar on "Brave Anna" and "Martin Road"!

Martin Road may be a disappointment to any fan of progressive, but we are fortunately much more than that. The inestimable charm and sweet nostalgia of tracks like "In Between A Home" or "Outside" allows the relentless fight against silent to which we sometimes feel the rush destiny. And at the end of eight minutes of the eponymous song, I lie down, devastated exhaustion. And I'm here to laugh in my heart for each note well tour, every piece of poetry that contain these notes and I think they are one of the best things I know to justify the existence of man on this earth. An art that can handle the tragedy of human life.