A TAB IN THE OCEAN

Nektar adds to the elements of the psychedelic and spacey side of the genre that they used for their debut album "Journey to the Centre of the Eye", hardened guitar riffs and consistent keyboards to create a solid proposal of rocky and rotund structures that the Englishmen settled in German lands execute with mastery and naturalness: "A Tab in the Ocean", their second work.

The eponymous "A Tab in the Ocean" is the centrepiece of the album, an extensive development of overflowing introduction in which Alan Freeman's organ and Roye Albrighton's raspy guitar riffs look forceful and very hard- rocking, and gradually incorporates Ron Howden's marching percussion, Derek Moore's thick bass and Albrighton's megaphonic voice in a psychedelic mode very much in the Floydian vein, thus building a vigorous instrumental wall tinged with arpeggiated guitar passages, and whose final section recreates the introductory melody giving an epic closure to the piece. A gem.

And the mid-tempo, jazzy and calm "Desolation Valley/ Waves" with Albrighton's whispering vocals and the wandering, at times intimate tones of the guitars and keyboards, gives way to the invigorated energy of "Crying in the Dark" and Albrighton's impetuous guitar solos as protagonists, and to the intensity of "King of Twilght" with the band's chorus softening the growing and powerful instrumentation until its abrupt end.

"A Tab in the Ocean", one of Nektar's seminal works, is an excellent album that was probably overshadowed in part by many of the legendary contemporary progressive rock epics released in the same year, 1972.

4/4.5 stars