IN THE REGION OF THE SUMMER STARS (1984)

This band have somewhat passed me buy. I recently acquired their latest release Jouney's End almost out of desperation at the lack of any decent modern symphonic prog releases. Being somewhat pleasantly surprised how good that is I quickly decided to pick up the remasters of this and Aerie Faerie Nonsense.

Certainly this is rock solid symph prog that has all the familiar ingredients on the instrumentation side of things. I suspect the reason The Enid never became that popular (other than timing,being up against punk etc) is the fact there are no vocals. I do like prog rock to have a bit of narrative and perhaps to have that human involvement.This to me gets itself mixed up between 2 very different genres not containing enough texture and layers to be Vangelis type electronic prog and not heavy or dynamic enough to threaten the likes of ELP and Yes in all their pomp and glory.The peices don't flow into each other as much as I would like either. I'm not convinced that this is their peak. Better was to come in my opinion.