ANGELS EMBRACE

The Unbearable Lightness of Jon Anderson.

This is a collection of atmospheric soundscapes, not terribly unlike, but slightly better than Frippertronics.

It appears that Jon sat in front of his synthesizers and created light, airy sessions of choral waves and keyboard washes and released them as new age mood music. He even went as far as adding the sound effects of birds and water noises to show us how pastoral these compositions are. To me that adds an annoying feature to what may have been nice background music for falling asleep.

There is on actual song on here, Prayersong, where Jon and Jade Anderson sing a prayer to whichever god it is that they believe in.

If you need to have all of Jon's work get it (after you get that enormous boxed set he was offering on his web site), otherwise, it's not necessary.

After having reviewed a Shub-Niggurath album I was in need of something celestial (hey wasn't it the meaning of Zeuhl?), so now I'm reviewing the most new-age, relaxing and peaceful album released by Jon Anderson.

Only keyboards and vocals, both ethereal, are in this album.

There's a short prelude sang by Jon and his daughter Deborah (the one of Private Collection): "Myo-Maya" that's followed by 14 minutes of keyboard soundscape with birds and drops of water to celebrate the "New Eire Land". Can you imagine a sunset on the cliffs of western Ireland? Jon surely can...

"Angels Embrace" has a lot of Vangelis in the sounds used. Jon sings "Myo Maya" again. It's a song that could have found a place in one of the Jon and Vangelis albums, unfortunately it should have been a three minutes song. Six are too much.

"Cloudsinging" starts on the same chords of the previous song, but thanks God it's not a follow-up. If you are in peace with the world or dreaming of fairies and woods this is for you. I like ambient music, but this is too much. If this is Paradise I'm not too interested.

"Prayersong", hey please stop the birds,... one thing: the tracks fade one into the other even when they should be dosconnected. 30 seconds of birds to fade out the previous track are too much. The song itself is not bad, a sort of Christmas carol like on 3 Ships on which appear even some minor chord.

Can you survive to 11 minutes of "Naturmusic"? Well, this is not how boring as one can expect, you just have to be tuned to it. The chords are less "major" and this makes it less cheesy. The rain fits well even though the birds make me wanting to be a hunter...just newage, but not bad.

"Midnight Cello" is the only true highlight of the album. It has a good melody with a classical mood. An ideal soundtrack for the final sequence of a dramatic movie, a sort of epitaph of the day passed...

What does it have to do with prog? Nothing, really.