MYTHS, LEGENDS AND TALES

Four years back I reviewed Darryl Way's album Children of Cosmos that was a major disappointment as my first acquaintance to his solo output. Remembering the violinist's participations in CURVED AIR and his more short-lived own group WOLF, plus his somewhat bold album-forewords referring to a prog spirit, it was twice as disappointing to find out that there frankly was not much progressive rock to be heard. Some of the tracks were fairly nice Celtic-flavoured easy listening stuff, especially the two instrumentals. The vocal pop -oriented whole was marred by phoney programmed sounds, although the electric violin sounded lovely.

This album from 2016 continues on the same direction, again being performed entirely by Darryl Way and containing two instrumental pieces. They are 'Orpheus and the Underworld' and the deeply romantic 'Aphrodite', easily the most pleasant tracks together with the album's only longer piece 'Prometheus Chained' which also is basically an instrumental as it features some reading of Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem. But sonically this myth-inspired album is notably better than the aforementioned. Despite the lack of a full band, the sound (featuring the electric violin, keyboards and programming) is more professional, more convincing. There's improvement also in the layout, by the way.

What comes to the seven more or less conventional and non-proggy songs with vocals, first off, Daryl certainly still isn't the best singer in the prog world. Whereas in 2014 my primary thought was a weaker version of John Wetton, now I got an association to Steve Hackett and his later output with his own vocals. Those songs with a slightly thicker rock approach, such as 'Dove of Peace' and 'Helter Skelter', are totally uninteresting to me, but three songs are actually quite good: 'Strange Goings On', 'The Ice Man' and 'Crusader'. If you took a handful of both good (not the best) and worse tracks from mediocre Hackett albums since the nineties, the result would be on the same level. [Change the guitar to violin, of course.] Perhaps there's just enough improvement from Children of Cosmos to stretch into three stars.

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