SPACE CABARET

Two year after their debut album CMU comes back with a very different line-up, where Loraine's main vocal partner has changed - Rick Joseph instead of James Gordon - and has become the main songwriter. Among the changes is Leary Hasson who will bring an impressive array of keyboards. An absolutely ugly cosmonaut artwork disgraces the album, reminiscent of Roger Dean's not always successful early artworks.

Opening on the atrocious (but thankfully short) title track, CMU offers the much better Archway 272, with mellotrons and a Sinclair-like fuzzed-out organ as well as a Rhodes, all courtesy of newcomer Leary Hasson. This track ends with a pulled saturated mike jack, but immediately goes into Song From The 4th Era that could be from Peter Hammill's Fool's Mate album. The meditative 7-mins Distant Thought retains the slight Hammill vocal influence, but the music is more in the Yes realm (all things considered). Closing up the first side is Doctor, another Joseph tune where only the bass seems alive with his acoustic guitar, until the 2/3 of the song, where Rhodes intervene as well, turning it nicely around for us progheads.

As a contrast to the five Joseph-penned tracks of the first side, there is only two longer ones on the flipside: the almost 10-mins Hamlett-penned Dreams and the 10-mins+ Hasson-written Lightshine. The former starts as a smooth gliding track, punctuated with Neil Young-like guitar interventions (Thinking of his Nowhere album), before the guitar goes funky and the Rhodes arrive for a verse, then the track plunges into a psyched dreamland for the following verse, the guitar sounding Hendrix-ey, this morphing into a slow ascending riff under the patronage of a fuzzed-out organ of Hasson and more changes coming up. Lightshine is a piano-written track, but after the intro comes a Moog interlude ala Emerson's Lucky Man. The track later grows into a raga where both singers trade verses than spreads its wings over vast Caravan-like soundscapes; Hasson's fuzzed out organ helping so.

As you could read in my reviews of CMU, there isn't much original or innovative and their influences are a bit too clear, but on the whole despite its ugly sleeve, Space Cabaret is an enjoyable but unessential piece of early prog rock. I'd say that this album is slightly better than Open Spaces, but this is marginal enough to say that it would a difficult choice to choose only one?. But ultimately this one gets the edge.

This is interesting. A big change from the predecessor. For people used to the more traditional sound of prog, with lots of organ and analog synths, developing a more symphonic, melodic and spacey sound, it will be an improvement over the predecessor. As for my own opinion, I disagree. I think the band lost a little bit of the flair that made their music captivating in their debut, with all that ecletism and although not hugely innovative, at least original sound.

Space Cabaret seems to be a somewhat concept album. At least, the first four songs are presented as a part of a large suite with a Space theme. The most experimental part of this suite is Archway 272, that shows some changes and is a showcase of their new sound heavily reliant on keyboards. On the other hand, I think the band lost a bit of energy in this new style, and while Song From the 4th Era is a great song and A Distant Thought, a Point of Light is also beautiful, they lack the quirkness that made songs interesting in their debut. These songs remind me a bit of Omega in their least prog songs in the 70s.

The second side has two long songs, that are the most interesting, with some long organ solos, a mix of styles (even a little bit of funk in Dream) but unfortunately they are not strong back-to-back. As if they have five or six minutes of great material, but padded it with a bit of less inspired music.

Too bad the band didn't survive the lack of success, because they had creativity and talent to maybe make a few great records still, had they continued. But, although this album sounds more like the dominant prog sound of the 70s, it is a bit less interesting than their debut. Maybe the fact that this album, being easier to compare with the top prog bands, shows more its flaws, while the freshness of their debut leave a better impression. Nonetheless, it is still a very good album.