DESTINATION

Right now I'm doing the duo review with Ra, shortly after each other because I feel these two albums are a bit related. The sound of them is more or less the same. We are talking about a more commercial sounding Eloy compared to their great era in the 70's.

Call of the Wild starts at least a bit spacy like we used to know them but after this the chorus and other vocal contribution prove we are indeed dealing with an almost poppish Eloy here. And that probably also explains the low average of this album. Still instrumentally a good song this but if you hate the overaccessible sound you will not appreciate that enough I fear. And with next track it's more or less the same actually, instrumentally pretty good, almost great even but the vocal aspect ruins it all. Why don't they keep their mouths shut you would think and then I get curious how the album would have sounded in that case. But that's hard to imagine I'm afraid. But it's night and day really, the difference in instrumental and vocal performance, hard to believe but true.

The title track is a little less annoying in the vocal department and is one of the better tracks of this album. Good composition with some nice wind instrumental performances.

Prisoner in Mind is by far the shortest song on the album. It's a pretty energetic song but not really outstanding where the inventiveness and compositional aspect is concerned. Silent Revolution is the longest track and talking about enegetic, this is even better in that department, a song with great rhythm and also here the singing is less out of line than on the first two songs. One of the better songs of the album.

Fire and Ice is a song with some nice acoustic guitar, a nice fluent song without being exceptional. Eclipse of Mankind is the other highlight mainly thanks to excellent guitarplay in the second half of the song. Jeanne D'Arc is the closing track and it contains some interesting community singing, a good song, worthy closer of a good album.

When I said in the beginning this album is related to Ra I meant the commercial sound compared to the 70's. There are also significant differences though and the main is that Destination is much more energetic than the more laid back Ra. I like that personally about Destination but still it's as well a bit of dislike for me because none of the songs really stand out and almost every song has it flaws. But there are no fillers here I have to admit and so the final conclusion is fairly positive and three stars is well deserved in my opinion.