FOCUS II [AKA: MOVING WAVES]

This album was released in my country in 1973 by Polydor, with "Sylvia" and "Love Remembered" from the album "Focus 3" replacing "Le Clochard" and "Janis" (I don`t know if this also happened in other countries). This L.P. sounds good with these 2 songs. But it was until years later that I knew that the original version of the album have "Le Clochard" and "Janis". As I have the CD, I write my review about the original album. "Hocus Pocus" is a very good song, with great guitars by Jan Akkerman and some humour by Thijs van Leer using his yodelling and vocals in a funny way. In the late eighties I watched on T.V. a video clip of a live version of this song, and Akkerman and the rest of the band (I don`t think that the drummer was Pierre van der Linden, but maybe the bassist was Bert Ruiter) were smiling and almost laughing when van Leer was doing his yodelling and the other humorous things he did in this song. This is the "heaviest" song in this album, and maybe their most known song.This album has some of the best uses of a mellotron in Progressive Rock. This is reflected in "Le Clochard" and "Focus II"."Le Clochard" is a song with acoustic guitar and mellotron, but without drums. "Janis" has some flutes by van Leer. "Moving Waves" is a very good song played only with the piano and with some English language lyrics (and good lyrics, too). The piano playing in this song really makes me imagine the "moving waves in the ocean".The song "Focus II" is my favourite. An instrumental piece where the guitar plays the melody, while the rest of the band does a very good arrangement. Van Leer uses the piano, the organ, and also plays very good mellotron arrangements. A song composed, arranged and played with feeling, really. "Eruption" is also very good, a musical piece with several parts and several styles of music put together, it includes influences by jazz, rock and classical music, plus some vocals which sound to me like "Gregorian Chants" (like the group ENIGMA from the 90s). It also has a very good drums solo by van der Linden. For me, this was the best line-up of the band, really sounding like they worked as a team for this album. This album is another great album recorded in 1971.In some websites dedicated to Focus, I found that the original Dutch version was released as "Focus II", with a different cover.