PARAPHERNALIA

This band caught my interest ever since I discovered one of their songs on a Cyclops samplers back in the early nineties. The song is actually on this release and is called Circus. It's a small epic of almost 10 minutes and I still think of it what I thought of it more than 15 years ago: the composition is interesting and fairly original but on the other hand it's not really impressive where the musical/instrumental excellence is concerned.

And that's in fact the story of the whole album I can say after hearing it a couple of times. This is nice neo prog but nothing really mindblowing. The vocals are average and sound typical British, the keyboards are more dominant with this band than the guitar. Third song Again starts with a captivating Pan Pipe melody but I must admit that this is the most outstanding bit of the whole album. On the other hand there are no sad fillers here, each song is at least worth while listening to and that can not be said of every album I heard in my life, so that's always an important plus.

But because all songs are in between 2,75 and 3,5 stars the final outcome for Paraphernalia can only be three stars. Nice debut. By the way, the band sounds a bit like eighties Pendragon, probably their biggest influence.

i generally ratify `progrules` review i personally only really liked the first 2 releases by pendragon ., and odd tracks thereafter , so by 1995 there was room for the likes of `so & so` to have a go the first trk is `dragon-like` but with crunchier guitar and an excellent bass player to. 2nd trk has power and dynamics , plus the vocalist seems to me to be rather good and strong. trk`s 3 & 5 are `it bites` like trk 4 is akin `the alarm` [prog styled] and a bit like `haze` to. trk 6 is similar to `max webster` with a `pallas` touch in there aswell. trk 7 is an excellent instrumental [in 3 pts] trk 8 is in 4 pts and is a `fiery` pendragon-like finisher ps ., the `third song` to me is one [of two] `weakest tracks` on the cd each trk out of ten : 8 / 8 / 6 / 7 / 6 / 6-7 / 8-9 / 8-9 so pretty good then plus if you see the original cheap [buy it] as in nr mint nick you can expect to get around £20.00 for it.