BRUFORD: ONE OF A KIND

Bruford had learned from the mistakes of the first album and this time went for an all instrumental album, with a slight exception of the narration on Fainting In Coils. The material here is in fact slightly superior compared to the debut but I can't help but think of One Of A Kind as just an improvement to the debut album. The material is better but there isn't really anything new or groundbreaking about this album.

Hell's Bells might not give the same kick-start as the intro of Beelzebub and instead shows us a slightly different take on an album opener that suits the material even better than an up-tempo composition would have done. The intro track is followed by the album-titled composition which, once again, is split into two parts. This track could just as well have been released as coherent piece and the only possible explanation I can think of was that the band did not want to extend a composition's duration to longer than 6,5 minutes. This notion is of course strange since the previous album featured two tracks that were longer than 7 minutes each.

Five G is a flashy bass extravaganza where Jeff Berlin finally gets a shot at the spotlight and shows everything that he is capable of. This is probably also my personal favorite track off this album because I just can't get enough of that lead-melody and all the transformations it undergoes during the performance.

At the end of the day I still consider One Of A Kind just a slightly superior reworking of the debut album which is by no means a bad thing. Maybe it's just my high expectations on a band consisting of Bruford/Berlin/Holdsworth/Stewart to go where no man has gone before that makes it difficult for me to see past some of the album's limitations and awarding it anything higher than a 4-star rating.

**** star songs: Hell's Bells (3:33) Five G (4:46) Forever Until Sundary (5:51)

**** star songs: One Of A Kind, Pt. 1 (2:20) One Of A Kind, Pt. 2 (4:04) Fainting In Coils (6:34) The Abingdon Chasp (4:54) The Sahara Of Snow, Pt. 1 (5:18) The Sahara Of Snow, Pt. 2 (3:25)

*** star songs: Travels With Myself - And Someone Else (6:13)

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