MERIDIAN

The only other album I have heard was released in 95 and I discovered it ten years later. I heard this one very recently, and find it to be similar to the other one so I figure all albums sound the same but this also means that Gerard is simply not for me. This neo might have been instrumentalto keep the movement alive in the 80's but nowadays, it sounds almost obnoxious (to my ears anyway) and the falsetto vocals still irk me beyond belief to the point that I have problem wanting to listen to the music behind it. Sorry for the people who like this, but this is not for me.

In the mid-Eighties Japanese progrock band Gerard released two excellent albums entitled Gerard and Empty Lie, Empty Dream, in those days they were a four piece band featuring Toshio Egawa as the Japanese answer to Emerson, Wakeman and Jobson and guitarplayer Yukihiro Fujimura who later left Gerard to found Vienna. On this CD the to a trio reduced Gerard plays seven tracks from these two albums in re-arranged versions. The focus is on Toshio Egawa with his ultra-bombastic style and amazing sounds from his Korg synthesizers with frequent, very sensational use of the pitchbend button. He often sounds like a guitar or violin, very similar to the sound of Eddie Jobson, great! Toshio also loves the play on the Hammond organ, he uses a digital Hammond with a Leslie box delivering lots of spectacular runs. At some moments I miss the tension between the electric guitar and keyboards as on the original tracks but Toshio plays so exciting and so the the super-dynamic rhythm-section does, like a high-adrenalin Neil Peart and Geddy Lee! If you love 'over the top keyboard driven prog', this one is yours!

What a beautiful noise !

No, this is no reference to the famous Neil Diamond hit but actually the best thinkable description of this album. But first an interesting statement:

This is the second time in two days that I notice a significant difference between my version of an album and the one shown on our site. I do believe PA's version is the right one because on mine I detect a song from a previous release by Gerard and that's the song Evidence of True Love, a mini-epic and a major song on my release. Major because it's one of the three most significant songs on this release along with the other two longer songs Orpheus and Melting Time. The rest of the songs is more or less forgettable compared to the three masterpiece tracks. Yes, I want to go that far !

I listened to these three songs many times on my mp3 player about a year ago and I remember my admiration for these songs grew more and more on me in that period. At first the songs sound just noisy and could be described as messy but when you give them every chance and listen to the melodic structure that is really there you could conclude they are actually brilliant !

And they make me come to the conclusion this album deserves 4 stars without any doubt. Gerard is not a straightforward neo progressive band but more a band in between neo, symphonic and heavy prog. They have some similarity with their fellow country people from Ars Nova who they actually performed together with. Both bands most prominent features are vintage keyboards that at first sound noisy and almost distorted but are in fact brilliant. If this all intrigues you, don't hesitate to check them out and then Meridian is a good starting point.