THE KING

If I understand the liner notes to Life Line Project's The King correctly, Erik de Beer actually started the process of composing the 38 minute title track to the album back in the 1970s, but it was not until 2006 when he attempted to record it after a nasty health scare made it uncertain whether he would ever live to see it completed. Happily for all concerned, Erik's medical issues turned out to be much less dangerous than feared, and in 2009 (which must have been around the same time as The Finnishing Touch was being prepared for release) Erik got the mix and mastering on the King to a point he was happy with and unleashed it on the world.

The centrepiece of the album is unquestionably the title track, with the four previous songs being little more than a warm-up exercise, though a competent enough one at that, giving de Beer a chance to show off his multi-instrumentalist skills. The main epic is, I fear, mildly hit and miss - there's a lot of enjoyable passages, but also some points which kind of bug me. (In particular, there's a vocal section about 10 minutes into it which never fails to drive me up the wall.) It's a reasonable symphonic effort and certainly no major embarrassment, but I can't say that I feel it was necessarily worth the multi-decade gestation period.