PROFILE

The album starts very unusually: with the long pièce-de-resistance, "Fresh Air", which is also divided in several parts. This piece is mainly driven by a lot of insane and extremely fast solos, making me wonder: "doesn't his fingers bleed?"..... In general, as a long instrumental track, Fresh Air isn't a coherent piece of music; it's just guitar madness with abundant percussions and bass and, of course, it couldn't resist any comparison to Focus' long epics like Eruption or Hamburger Concerto. But well, this could be the only bland moment (all the first side really) on the LP, together with the closing track, Stick, a bluessy number that reminds me any track from his previous album, Talent for Sale.

In comparison to its predeccessor, this album has more approaches to Focus (the band that Jan led with Thys van Leer), and it's a good point, even if these similar songs, Blue Boy & Maybe Just a Dream, aren't good enough to compare them to any classic Focus track, because those two songs sound a little lack of inspiration.

But now I'm gonna tell the reason why I've put three stars and a half: because of the BRILLIANT guitar/lute work on the rest of the songs; the traditional Kemp's Jig, the Etude by Matteo Carcassi, the beautiful Andante Sostenuto (one of my favourites and definitive highlights here) and Minstrel, which's really a short version of the lute piece "Elspeth of Nottingham", from Focus' third album, and it was mixed with another folky acoustic piece, "Farmer's Dance". Those four tracks save this LP to be just a curiosity and make this one an over three-stars deserver, but not reaching the fourth star because of the dilated opening track.

Cosick.

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