RAIN DANCES

With Richard Sinclair and Mel Collins joining the lineup, Camel used Rain Dances as an opportunity to experiment with their sound, with the jazzy Canterbury influences creeping in with the new boys not quite being enough to steer the album away from the accessible, commercial direction it was headed in.

The decision to change the Camel sound for a more commercial one doesn't mean the album is stuffed with attempts at hit singles, mind; First Light is a five minute instrumental workout which teases out the best of the new lineup, whilst Metrognome enchantingly blends the styles of Camel and Richard Sinclair's old bandmates in Caravan to take things in a more whimsical direction.

As a result of the rather varied (and, at points, inconsistent) sound of the album, it took Rain Dances a bit longer to grow on me than Camel's outright classics. The fact is that Rain Dances is a transitional album with a dose of all the problems which usually haunt transitional albums - it's not a pure example of Camel's more commercial direction, and it's not a pure example of Camel's prior direction either. It's from here on in where the Camel story runs into a few humps - though for my money, whilst this isn't a peak of Camel's output, it's a pretty solid album which bridges the gap between the 1970s symphonic prog scene it emerged from and the 1980s neo-prog scene Camel would pave the way for.