BELIEVE

When I learned about Not of this world, fell in love with it completely and reviewed it I knew this had to be their best effort ever and it would probably never be surpassed anymore. And what is left after such an apogee ? That's a tough one. The band could have quit or make a radical change. A third possibility might have been to try and do something almost as good as NotW but to top that one, I'd say: keep dreaming !

So it became the 2nd option: make a (radical) change. Well, let's not exxagerate, it's a pretty big change but at least I can still recognize it as Pendragon. But where the astonishing compositions were plenty on NotW on this album they made way for a very diverse range of songs, some (very) good but others far less. I can be more precise here: the first four, among which the epic (consisting of 4 parts) The wishing Well don't impress me really, they are good songs and I really have a hard time here not trying to compare them to NotW. But even if I don't: these four songs reach an average of about 3 stars to me. But fortunately the sting is in the tail here. Learning Curve and mainly the gorgeous The Edge of the World make up for a great deal. I think the last track is the most beautiful ballad Pendragon has ever produced.

But alas it is not enough to save this album from a 3 star rating although it's rounded down (3,33).