THREE TIMES SEVEN ON A PILGRIMAGE

This was a quite good but not really essential compilation by great Norwegian band IN THE WOODS meant as a kind of tribute to psychedelic music. It's comprising amongst others of a couple of cover versions like Syd Barrett's "Let There Be More Light", Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" and King Crimson's "Epitaph", most of which worked out quite successful apart from the second one which doesn't work, at least not for me. Even the female vocals don't sound pleasant here to my ears though obviously the same singer as on their other albums is performing them. Whereas she sounds really great with her wordless vocals on "Mourning The Death of Aase" which has a nice Floydian touch starting in a rather slow blusey rhythm and developing great dynamics later on. This track fits on here much better than on their (undoubtedly strong) debut I've to say. The remaining six tracks on here have been either released before on 7'' or planned to be. Best ones from those are "Karmakosmik" which is a slow and very mournful one and "If It's In You" which is as well a very slow and acoustic song with some oddly sounding vocals and background noise with laughter at its end. Most pointless and redundant track is "Soundtrack For Cycoz 1st Ed" IMHO which is an unsuccessful experiment of some boring ambient electronic sound. "Seed of Sound", a short one with jangling guitar sound, "Child Of The Universal Tongue" which is a decent gothic rock song and "Empty Room" combining acoustic guitar with ambient music are quite good tracks, but of course by far not on par with anything from their masterpiece "Omnio".

Coming to a conclusion we get here a quite nice disk with one or two highlights which is certainly of interest if one owns already all official releases from this exceptional band. But overall I would say it's not to be considered an essential addition.