LAND OF COCKAYNE

I used to joke that Soft Machine might be the only band I know to have made the transition from free jazz to smooth jazz. Upon rewriting this review in 2022 I'm tempted to say that such a statement is giving this album not enough credit, but I could just as easily say that it's giving it too much credit because Land Of Cockayne is for all intents and purposes a Karl Jenkins solo album using the Soft Machine brand name, with very little stylistic overlap or historical continuity to connect it to the original band. A shame that the last album to come out under the Soft Machine name in almost forty years contains little more than some half-interesting elevator music. Alright alright, some of the songs on here have a decent groove going on, with "Panoramania" and the Alan Parsons-ish "Over & Above" probably rocking the catchiest melodies and "Sly Monkey" being the sole track on which the presence of guitar maestro Allan Holdsworth isn't completely wasted, but pretty much every song (even the aforementioned ones) seems to last just a little bit longer than it needs to. Everything's just too safe and too afraid to truly stand out. "Hot-Biscuit Slim" gets downright annoying after a while, and all the primitive pseudo-classical stuff littered throughout the album is just a pretentious waste of disc space.