KALEIDOSCOPE

Well, here we have the much awaited, fourth Transatlantic release! Well I can say that I didn't expect the lyrical themes to be anything but Christian dogma, and obviously I wasn't wrong! In fact in the last release, we had the whirlwind - the maelstrom of human suffering - obviously contrived by god to make everybody suddenly start to believe in the ranting's of some fourth century misogynists. This time it's the LIGHTNING - aye we have to ride this to get into gods magic go-cart and hey-presto we're all going to live forever. oh goody. Anyway - let's have no more about the mawkish lyrics (well I'll try) and get to the music and content of the CD. Track one - (Into the Blue) the opening epic. This has good bits, and a reasonably lengthy Stolt solo, but for me the patchy good bits do not mask a going-through-the-motions exercise. Not a promising start, and I'd give this track a one star rating! Track Two - (Shine) H'm, lyrically awful and bland, not saved by a very powerful Stolt solo, with the solo this gets two stars! Track Three - (Black as the Sky) - Now here is a saving track! Forget the lyrical content, again it's about the rat race and thirst for money (and of course the saviour is Morse's imaginary sky-fairy friend and his equally legendary son!) - the music is good (some of it lifted from Spock's Beard Snow), but this is a good track musically powerful with nice keyboards, worth having in your collection so five stars! Track Four (Beyond the Sun) - As awful as it gets, pathetic ballad about the Christian delusion of this place where you live forever, pressing flowers, and floating on clouds or whatever - sounds ghastly! Anyway this place is beyond the sun - somewhere, though Morse can't actually tell us if it's even in our galaxy for Dawkins sake! Anybody would think he was just making it up! (zero stars!!! for being so bloody soppy) Track Five - (Kaleidoscope) - The longest and second best track on this CD! - I like this track, despite it being sort of whirlwind-lite and it has several riffs that are very like those found in Snow by Spock's Beard... This starts well and has a lovely keyboard solo as well, and some nice guitar work, the reprise and fade out at the end spoil it somewhat but I'd give it four stars. So overall we have 12 stars divided by five tracks, 2.4 stars which I'll round up to three because as always the musicianship is outstanding, but I expect that. Lets hope that they will produce something different the next time they get together. But they wont if they let Morse near the thing. Maybe they should invite Lalo Huber to be the partner from the Americas on keyboards and get a guest singer in (Gildenlow would be perfect).