SILVER MOON

Rather nice debut album by this Japanese project.

Slow, mellow and melodic symphonic rock is the name of the game, with some influences from jazz and folk music thrown into the mix now and then. Of the 12 songs, 5 are standalone tracks and 7 are parts of a longer conceptual tune; all of them basically exploring this style.

Nice music; but the long tracks and the long segments tends to get a bit repetitive; and are in general slightly too long for my liking.

Fans of mellow symphonic rock should find this release pretty interesting though, and I would guess that those with a liking for artists like Mike Oldfield might find this one to contain interesting material as well.

Accept is a one-man band from Japan with multi-instrumentalist Hisa being the only member.Some 20 years of composing and trying to establish his own sound,heavily influenced by British Progressive Rock,Hisa released a full hour of his tries under the Accept name and the album ''Silver moon''.This was released on Vital Records,actually a sub-label of the Japanese Poseidon Records,with only the help of female vocalist Izu on a couple of tracks.

The album is strongly based on Hisa's work on acoustic guitars,synthesizers and spacey electric solos,thus presenting a weird mix of Symphonic Rock and New Age with plenty of vocals,but also some dull moments.A very relaxing affair,''Silver moon'' contains some nice Symphonic-oriented instrumental work with nice guitar parts and dreamy synthesizers,however the next moment the album gets fully into boring New Age fields in the vein of later days-MIKE OLDFIELD with cheesy sampled flutes and strings and cheap effects.The instrumental acoustic passages are quite decent,somewhat close to the works of ANTHONY PHILLIPS,but again this good stuff will be often interrupted by Hisa's bad vocals.Speaking of vocals,female singer Izu has a fantastic, crystalline voice and being promoted to a full-time singer would be a good idea.The keyboard work is again in a Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde vein: Some orchestral keyboards and smooth piano passages are very good,the New Age synths though are pretty hypnotic without adding anything good to the music.

Uneven start for Mr. Hisa.''Silver moon'' is a quite calm work for most of its part and this kind of music should be heavily based on some memorable melodic material.Accept succeeds this at a short percentage,with plenty of the during time lost in uninteresting ''digitalized'' surreal passages.Recommended mostly for background music...2.5 stars.