STARCASTLE

I really dug Starcastle's Fountains of Light - yes, it's a slavish Yes clone, but it was an extremely well-accomplished one which nicely complements Yes's own work rather than merely being redundant next to it.

Listening to their debut album, however, I can totally see how people would be dismissive of the band. This first release is a Yes clone in all the least fashionable ways, unabashedly mimicing their Yes Album/Fragile-era sound but with a production and composition style which seems cynically tailored to make it as commercially accessible as possible. A pointless exercise from the point of view of today, maybe, but bear in mind that when this came out Yes had been a major commercial force a few years previously and they'd been on hiatus since Relayer. The idea of turning out a Yesalike album with a slightly more commercial and radio-friendly spin on their classic sound must have sounded like a good idea at the time, though of course musical trends would soon shift in the other direction hard, and when Yes came back with Going For the One this must have looked especially laughable.

It's a great shame that Starcastle put this out as their first album, rather than refining their style further to the more accomplished form achieved on Fountains of Light, because anyone hearing this album first would write it off as an outright copy of Yes, and they wouldn't really be wrong. That said, there's some charming vocal harmonies here and the music isn't exactly unpleasant - and when it comes to cloning Yes, few bands from the 1970s other than Druid came as close as this.