THE LAST BRIGHT LIGHT

"The Last Bright Light" is an excellent followup to "The Spirit of Autumn Past". The songs are a balance of heavy rock to ambient pastoral ballads and Celtic flavours. The lyrics are focussed on searching for answers, to find security and to protect the environment.

The indispensable songs that are played live often are the infectious melodic 'We Come And We Go', fan favourite 'Never the Rainbow', 'Half The Mountain' with Pink Floyd atmospheres, soaring lead breaks and Gilmour-ian vocals, and the amazing mini epic 'Mother Nature'. This 12 minute treasure has some sumptuous piano and harmonies that are carried along with breezy synths, and a delightful lead guitar break. It builds to a heavy passage with howling wind and a driving beat. The keyboard solo is also a superb embellishment to the music, making this one of the band's greatest triumphs. The heavier side of the band is also found on the catchy 'The Dark Before the Dawn', complete with The Who style synths, and the rhythmic memorable 'Never the Rainbow', one of my favourites from the group.

I like the quiet respite of Heather Findlay's vocals and Angela Goldthorpe's exquisite pastoral flute on "The Eyes Of The Forest", a soft ballad about the plight of treefelling. Findlay is also beautiful on the vocals of 'Hollow', with precious acoustic and keyboard musicianship. There are Celtic moments such as joyous instrumental 'Helm's Deep', and 'Prints in the Stone' with gorgeous flute passages and the slow peaceful 'Shrinking Violet', haunting and mesmirising with dreamy vocals. 'Which Wood?' is also a pleasant instrumental flute driven romp. These quiet moments are of course one of the drawcards to Mostly Autumn, who are concerned about the environment and filling albums up with slow measured beauty. The ambient ethereal 'Just Moving On' leads seamlessly to 'We Come and We Go', the band in their most melancholy mood. 'The Last Bright Light' moves into some uplifting crescendos and an absorbing structure, with gentle vocals and a soundscape of deep bass male choral intonations and acoustics over a layer of synth strings.

The musicianship is excellent throughout especially the organ phrases of Iain Jennings, Josh Bryan's guitar hooks, Andy Smith's Bass, Jonathan Blackmore's drumming and some wonderful flute from Goldthorpe. It is an album of over 70 minutes of compelling music and features some of the band's most beloved songs. Overall, this is one of the best Mostly Autumn albums available along with the previous album "The Spirit of Autumn Past" and "Passengers."