BY THE DAWN'S EARLY LIGHT

Call me a Philistine, but I can think of nothing worse than having to sit through spoken word poetry. It's that type of poetry where nothing rhymes and just ends up sounding really pretentious. Plus the fact... How often can you listen to a deadbeat emotionless voice reciting off a bunch of seemingly random thoughts. Tedious in the extreme.

At least there's a few good moments between Mr Budd's turgid poems. Rather than being purely piano based, this time he's helped out with viola and a pedal steel guitar. This adds another arrow to his bow, but the novelty soon wears thin.

There's a couple of good tunes on "By The Dawn's Early Light", but overall this is a miserable, static, melancholic addition to Harold Budd's recordings which certainly won't earn him many new fans. Listenable if you programme your cd player to cut out the spoken word tracks.