GRACIOUS !

Another obscure british band from the 70´s I had never heard of until recently. They realesed just two albums before they broke up. Unlike many reviewrs here, I dont´see this one as a lost gem, much less a masterpiece. it is quite interesting and has some nice tracks, like the first two, Introduction (good heavy rock with some nice guitars and vocals) and Heaven (quite progressive and daring). But the remainder of the tracks are little more than experiments that did not faire well. Hell is a piece that sounds like a carbon copy of something King Crimson could have done a lot better. Pointless. Fugue in D minor is a little classical piece that has nothing to do with the rest of the album. And even the supposed ´tour de force´ of the album, the almost 17 minute suite The Dream, is nothing more than a collage of ideas without much coherence or focus. Interesting in the beginning, boring after the first four minutes..

So in the end I found that those guys were quite good musicians but had neither found their own sound nor developed their songwriting skills enough to granted them a more than tentative first. Small wonder this one went a little unnoticed at the time. Even for 1970 there were far better and more structured albums to be heard. This is surely for fans, collectors and completionists. Final rating: something between 2 and 2,5 stars.