ONCE UPON A TIME IN ENGLAND VOLUME 2

Several songs (six as such, and two partially) from this pre-Pendragon collection of songs will make their entry on later works of the band. This recording will please Pendragon maniacs (as I am) but I'm afraid that newbies won't be turned into a fan while listening to these songs.

Some of these belong to their poppish repertoire as "Time For A Change" and "The Mask" (both on what I consider as their weakest album by far : "Kowtow"). On their first excercise "Once Upon Volume One" I mentioned that the vocals were particularly poor. This will be avoided on the second volume, fortunately.

"Whalespeak" is a nice and spacey instrumental track featuring great backing keys and a good guitar solo. The romantic Pendragon aspect is already featured here. But songs as "No More Tricks" and "More Than Just Freedom" are really childish and poorly recorded. "Holiday 89" can only be considered as a short interlude.

Pendragon was rather disreet on the front of new studio albums those days. Between "Masquerade" (1996) and "Believe" (2005) they will only release one album with new material : "Not of this World". So, to keep the fans a bit awake, the band will output lots of live and compilation albums.

My two preferred songs (but they are well known) are "Victims Of Life" and "The Black Knight" of course. They belong to the classic Pendragon repertoire and oustand easily on this album. This version of "The Black Knight" is particularly brilliant. Much better than the one available on "9-15 Live".

The other numbers are mostly average ("Last Bus Back", "I Walk The Rope", "Sleep", "Valleys") to poor ("Oriental Man")

Even if this album is better than the first volume, my overall rating will be the same. It is rather difficult to consider this work higher than two stars. Maybe that five out of ten would have been more appropriate while only three for volume one. But due to the limitation of the current rating system, both will end up with two stars.