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Circles End - Hang On To That Kite CD (album) cover

HANG ON TO THAT KITE

Circles End

Eclectic Prog


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5 stars My son discovered this band for me last year while browsing mail-in underground metal site The End records?!After hearing few sound bites from the site,I decided to order this album.What a discovery!One of the best new artists of the new millenium and that ain't a joke.Musically,it's a mix of different styles including symph.prog,funk and jazz(mainly canterbury,IMHO)with main point being heavenly vocals by Karl Riis Jacobsen,best I heard on prog record in a long time.Rest of the band is also in top form showcasing top notch musicianship in complex,yet easy flowing soundscapes.Beautiful melodies,perfect production,40 plus minutes of pure delight.Definitely,one of the best new bands around,not to be missed.
Report this review (#102294)
Posted Saturday, December 9, 2006 | Review Permalink
Mellotron Storm
PROG REVIEWER
4 stars Very enjoyable release from this young Norwegian band. There are a lot of Canterbury elements to their music, and their vocalist has a warm, rich, unique voice.

The first song "Echoes" has a lot of tempo changes and is jazzy for the most part with sax and organ. The pastoral passages feature guitar and vocals. Check out the "Abacab" moment in this one as well. "Tiny Lights" , "Too Few Feet" and "Long Shot" are all good songs, especially the latter. Again the vocals are great. The lyrics don't make a lot of sense on any of the songs either. "Red Words" is a slower paced song that is really well done. I can just get lost in this song, it's beautiful.

"Charlie" is an uptempo instrumental with lots of guitar. Great tune. "At Shore" is my favourite as an acoustic guitar provides the melody in this melancholic, slow moving tune.The vocals are as usual terrific and there is some cello towards the end. "Peeping Tom" has some Fripp-like guitars in the intro, and they come and go throughout the song. Some good piano melodies as well. The final song "The Dogfather Has Entered the Lift" is a jazzy instrumental with some beautiful sax.

Such a great sounding band with that strong Scandanavian flavoure.This is a band to keep an eye on in the future and this release is easy to recommend.

Report this review (#102696)
Posted Monday, December 11, 2006 | Review Permalink
3 stars Circles End, based in Kristiansand, Norway, leave no doubt about their talent and potential on this album, which sadly seems to be the last we'll hear from them -- the band's website appears not to have been updated since 2007.

All the more reason to check this album out, which contains some superb moments. The music is often very Cantebury, and that's when the band is at its best. Some excellent saxophone work finishes off very nice and intricate arrangements reminiscent of National Health or Hatfield and the North.

Unfortunately this jazzy side is only half the story, the other half being simpler, serious passages, chiefly the ones led by the singer Riis Jacobsen, which are very earnest and remind me of more modern American soul pop balladeers. This clash of styles is nowhere more manifest than in "Two few feet", a super tune ruined (I think) by the mournfully sobbing vocals and self-obsessing lyrics which insist, completely at odds with the otherwise cheerful tune, that there is every reason to be depressed. It all comes together nicely in the opening track "Echoes", but for the rest of the album I'm afraid the differing styles compete rather than enhance each other, and the boys would have done better with a different style of singer. This is not to criticise Riis Jacobsen's singing as such -- in a soul band he'd be great!

For me this album is too schizophrenic, evidencing a band that can't quite decide where to go. The cover artwork is parodically retro, the front image stuffed with as many vintage items as they could lay hands on (excepting the glasses of the character to the right...) and packed with Pythonesque humour, contrasting the sincere, at times even downcast lyrics. Parts of the band are clearly very influenced by the English 70s prog scene (e.g. the superb and archetypically Cantebury instrumental "The Dogfather Has Entered the Lift" -- not elevator!), yet the singing is in American English.

In summary, Circles End were promising great things with this album back in 2004, which unfortunately do not seem to ever materialise. By all means

Report this review (#1259181)
Posted Monday, August 25, 2014 | Review Permalink

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