AIRCONDITIONING

At the time of release of this debut album, I was too young (eleven) to have discovered it and I missed ''Curved Air'' in their early days and afterwards as well since when I got really into prog ('73) , I mostly concentrated on the ''giants''.

When I listen to the great opening ''It Happened Today'', I have some regret. The psyche flavour, the female vocals.did I say ''Airplane''? A real gem of a song. The infectious chorus is easy to memorize and the fine violin break is just like a wonderful add on. I like this song very much.

The landing to earth is quite hard with the bluesy-rock'' Stretch'' which sounds rather flat; but since the psychedelic and melodic ''Screw'' follows, there aren't too many damages so far. The work from Darryl Way on the violin is again excellent. He and Sonja are really the best ingredients so far. The band is instantly recognizable thanks to them.

The second highlight is ''Vivaldi''. It is THE showcase for Darryl and his wonderful violin. Furious as some wild guitar solo, emotional like an Hungarian violin player: he is just amazing. The sublime closing section with the whole band playing loudly and frenetically is truly superb. A great instrumental track, for sure.

This album holds a lot of very good song. Of course, several of them embrace the psychedelic genre, but remember that this album was released in '70. Even if the peak of this style was already behind, it still remained popular for a little while. ''Hide & Seak'' is a wonderful example.

This album ends up on three extremely short tracks of which ''Vivaldi With Canons'' is by far the best one. Some sort of recap for ''Vivaldi''.

I have appreciated this good debut album. Three stars, mainly due to some weaknesses here and there.