TO THE WORLD OF THE FUTURE

The law of diminishing return seems to apply for EARTH & FIRE. Again, another two year wait between LPs, but at least they tied people over the previous year (1974) with a single entitled "Love of Life"/"Tuffy the Cat". At this point, original bassist Hans Ziech left (but still continued writing material at this point), with new bassist Theo Hurts replacing him. This album is a bit of a departure from their previous offerings. The Mellotron isn't as present (it's still used, but this time, it's the white 400 model, and string synths are now used), but the band increased the synthesizers quite a bit. Also, some disco tendencies are starting to show.

The album opens up with the title track, which starts off with a sequence of spacy synthesizer sounds, before the music kicks in. The music itself has more of a disco sound that would obviously throw off old time EARTH & FIRE fans. It's not bad, and there's still that progressive element. The next song is the ever sappy and (in my book) unbearable "How Time Flies". Just overdramatic and overly sentimental. Luckily the album rebounds nicely with the instrumental "The Last Seagull". It starts off with the sound of seagulls, and the spacy string synths come in, before the band jams with electric piano and guitar. It's nice to hear the band using electric piano and string synths, sure gives the band more dimension, that's a plus. "Only Time Will Tell" was another song released as a single, is more in the vein of their previous album, "Atlantis". "Voice From Yonder" is another favorite of mine, it starts off with an electric piano. The lyrics deal with a seance, and in fact, the band was apparently conducting a seance, and you even hear a voice used from that seance. What a cool song that is. Then there's "Love of Life", which was already released as a single the previous year. This song previewed listeners the direction EARTH & FIRE was heading (that meant a more synth-heavy direction). Then the album closes with "Circus", which is a great song that goes through several changes.

"To the World of the Future" was the very first EARTH & FIRE album I was ever exposed to, thanks to my dad buying a copy when I was still a kid (I'm sure my dad probably didn't know what he was buying when he bought that album, but I'm glad he did, and I'm glad many years later I found out they had many more albums). Anyway, not as strong as their previous albums, but still worth having. (3 1/2 stars)