DAVID CROSS & ANDREW KEELING: ENGLISH SUN

When all is said and done this may well end up being the strangest review ever written on Prog Archives, but I am going to give it a go. Mr. Cross sent me a copy of this CD when I volunteered to review it on behalf of Prog Archives and after a couple of listens I came to the conclusion that "Houston, we have a problem". I am seriously not qualified to review this collection of musical pieces. So I set it aside and decided that it was probably better if I didn't write a review for it. A few months have passed and my conscience started nagging me that since I had volunteered to write a review for this CD, that I really should give it a go; especially, when I looked this morning and saw that there had not been any reviews done, except for one 1-star rating.

Mr. Cross is fairly well known around these parts, but for those who don't know who he is, he played violin and viola on a few fairly well known masterpieces from a somewhat obscure band called King Crimson. Mr. Cross has released a number of albums since his days with King Crimson, however, I am not familiar with them and I am unable to compare this album to those solo albums. I am not quite sure what I was expecting when I volunteered to review this album, but I suppose it was something along the lines of "It will be so cool to hear Larks' Tongues In Aspic revisited". I am sorry to say that that was not the case here. What we have here is what the artists describe as Electric Chamber Music. Mr. Cross has teamed up with flautist Andrew Keeling on this album that consists almost entirely of violin and flute.

The most important thing that I would like to note is that this combination of violin and flute has resulted in a collection of absolutely beautiful musical pieces in the classical music vein. But here is where we have another problem on a progressive rock website. There is no rock on this album. To a certain extent, this is like trying to fit the square in the space meant for the triangle. In my opinion at least, it just doesn't fit in with the musical theme of this website. Where I see this album having great value is for a candlelight dinner with your significant other helping to set a relaxing and romantic mood, although the beauty and the quiet peacefulness of the music might have the undesired effect of being too relaxing and just putting you and/or your significant other to sleep.

In trying to fit this in within the rating scheme provided here at Prog Archives I feel that it is best to rate it with 2 stars as an album for collectors/fans only. Since I don't feel that it qualifies as progressive rock music it would be difficult to say that it was a masterpiece of progressive rock music or even an excellent addition to any prog rock music collection. As I previously said the music is gorgeous, and thus disqualifies the album in my mind from being rated 1-star as poor. This left me with the two-star and three-star options and this is where personal preferences and tastes came into play. Although, I personally think the music is beautiful, it really isn't the type of music that I am going to ordinarily reach for. However, I believe that fans of David Cross and Andrew Keeling or fans of "Electric Chamber Music" might really enjoy this album. Unfortunately, since this is not my normal fare I am not certain how this music compares in relation to similar type music, but it seems to me that the quality of playing would be appealing to fans of relaxing music.

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