ECHOES

I've long held the view that Camel in the early years were a great band, but lost something with the departure of Peter Bardens. This compilation CD reinforces that opinion for me. The first CD contains tracks from all the albums up to Rain Dances, and is consistently good throughout (OK, maybe not the less interesting Tell Me and Elke, but definitely all the rest). All the obvious picks are here, Lady Fantasy, Lunar Sea, the extract from the Snow Goose that was always played live, and Never Let Go, amongst others. The first part of CD2 is also pretty good, some fans don't rate Breathless as an album but the three tracks included here are probably the best on that particular work. After that the quality takes a dip, though not immediately, Hymn to Her is a good progressive song, and Sasquatch a decent instrumental, but Your Love Is Stranger Than Mine and the two songs from Nude dip too much into pop territory. And I'm afraid I find Ice a bit boring. The last five tracks on CD2 I could happily miss out completely, they are poor.

So in conclusion I would say, on average, Echoes is a two star album, unless you have no early Camel albums, in which case I'd give it a four star rating. Does that make sense? For the purpose of this review I'll average it out as 3 stars.