GATES TO SECRET REALITIES

And what can I say? Nothing really special. Just an usual New Age album, with some different rythms and moods and with a great variety of instruments, but with all the cliches you can imagine from a disc of this genre... Ancestral choirs, landscapes, soft pianos, lots of keyboards, ethereal voices, etnic flutes, ecologic messages...The collaboration of Emily Burridge provides some good female voices and a beautiful cello sometimes... But nothing sounds here surprising, the originaly is totally missing. In addition, the electric guitar solos and acoustics from Gandalf are too much in the Mike Oldifeld style in my opinion, thing that doesn't help to improve the personality of this album...

Nevertheless, songs like Dreamcatcher (the best song of the album, and a good opening), Along The Milky Way (beautiful piano here) and Ascending on the Eagle's Wings (good acoustic guitars and marvellous cellos) are good New Age songs, pretty enjoyable acts if you like this genre. Another parts of the songs, like the beautiful piano at the end of Majestic Mountain View, the guitar solos of The Power of Nature (but I don't like the choirs at the beginning of the song, a little vulgar in my opinion...) or the nice flutes and Mike Oldfield-like solos of Man's Promise to Mother Earth are very nice too. But after a couple of listenings, everything start to sound a little repetitive and very predictible in my opinion... Nevertheless, I have to admit that Gandalf put his soul into every song. But sometimes, this is not enough...

Conclusion: if you are into the the New Age territories, maybe you will find some good moments here, but don't expect nothing original or surprising. And of course, if you are looking some prog here, you will not find it anywhere...