TOUCH ME

While it's not exactly my cup of tea, the Enid's "Touch me" is the type of music to have tea to. It's a uniquely English take on modern symphonic music in much the way AMAZING BLONDEL filled the role for Elizabethan music, and in fact the album cover and the fine gentleman on display do make me think of Blondel during their very early period. Since ENID released this in 1979, it's clear they were even more out of touch, or perhaps they just didn't care, being obsessed with imparting their unique vision to those few who were willing to mail order it. My review is based on an LP version that contains "Dambusters March/Land of Hope and Glory" as the final cut after "Albion Fair".

Apart from the elegant and imposing "Cortege", not much of this grabs me, although it does make for good background listening at a low to middling volume range where I can have pretensions to being a sophisticated fan of the classics. Particularly on the first and last parts of the "Charades" suite, I feel like I am listening to an overture from "Wizard of Oz", or those introductions to the Wonderful World of Disney so ingrained into my early childhood. Both are lost without a context, and so is this. It needs some manner of visuals to set off the overly bright melodies. "Albion Fair" is more of a complete work, building slowly before the similar sprightly themes ebb and flow. What is most fascinating is how the impression is decidedly symphonic yet the instrumentation is largely rock. Since I can pretty much tell a guitar from a keyboard, I have to conclude that most of these sounds come from the latter. This puts the Enid into a similar camp to some of SYNERGY's work, although they really do strive to sound less synthetic. The closer is a full throttle "Land of Hope and Glory" that ends with all the bombast of a BARCLAY JAMES HARVEST finale from the Harvest period of which Robert John Godfrey was a part.

In a genre where so many are bandied about as unique, the ENID truly is, but I also suspect that others have volleyed about a similar premise only to conclude that neither artistic nor commercial fulfillment would result. I'm not going to lie and recommend this to any but the longhairs among you, but in the Enid's spirit of reaching out, I will do so and magically touch 3 stars.