SOLAR FIRE

Manfred Mann's Earth Band's Solar Fire opening with Father of Day, Father of Night, an example of one of Mann's more notable talents: taking a second-string Bob Dylan song and redeeming it through entirely transforming the musical backing. Taking this decidedly hippified anthem and putting it through a series of symphonic prog filters turns it into a memorable trip and a tasty appetiser for the rest of the album. If what follows often doesn't quite measure up to the brilliant opener (ah, let's be honest - nothing comes close to it), it's still a competent enough release which will appeal to most fans of symphonic prog, and it finds the band's compositional powers working hard to radically scale back their reliance on cover versions, even though the cover version here is the best of the lot.