LAST AUTUMN'S DREAM

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"Last Autumn's Dream" is their definitive effort, regarding of their maturity and versatility as well, even though it stands alone as one of the best "Proto-progressive works" of the seventies, in the UK. Their line-up was made with a five piece, including Alan Price on drums and Dave Duhig on guitar, but unlike its predecessor. This album was more in the vein of their debut album, along with some remarkable tunes such as "Lady of the Lake", "Winter's Tale" and "May Queen" - whose composition combines such an Oriental music stuff, within a rock apparatus.

Recommended as an original work, perhaps a bit simplistic, but always fresh!!

I do not like the irritating rhythmic guitar sound: it is almost grunge sometimes. The tracks often start smoothly, then you feel that the intensity increases; it becomes improvised garage hard rock a la Jimi Hendrix with an irritating grunge guitar sound. Fortunately, there are some interesting mellow & peaceful bits.

I appreciate the very smooth, delicate and graceful oriental influences like on the Kites, Waves and Floating World albums, which are also quite more peaceful. The problem here is that I find Last Automn's too unequal, gross and brutal.

Rating: 2.5 stars

Final album for Vertigo, and the best one, in my book. I never really thought the early JADE WARRIOR for Vertigo as a prog rock band. More like a varied rock band that included hard rock, jazz, folk, and ethnic influences. There are actually quite a few straightforward songs that I don't really feel comfortable call prog. There are some more adventurous numbers as well. I don't really call myself a big JADE WARRIOR fan, and I don't feel the need to have every album they did, but this is actually a quite decent album.

Obviously, the band members had vastly differing tastes, since the songs here range from the sublime to the ridiculous. Once I heard their subsequent release, Floating World, it became apparent where the real talent was. The recent remastered releases sound wonderful; the Line label reissues were muddy-sounding. Program in the great songs, and pretend the crappy ones never existed. The same goes for their first two albums, and for Eclipse and Fifth Element.

This 3rd release would prove to be JADE WARRIOR's last on the Vertigo label and IMHO one of their best overall albums. JADE WARRIOR's progressive leanings clearly come from their original genre fusions of rock and world... clearly in their approach. JADE WARRIOR blend Jon Field's flute with Tony Duhig's non- standard guitar tunings along with interesting percussion (congas, bells.) elements resonating a highly crafted and original sound. "Last Autumn's Dream" is an album that utilizes experimentation, a touch of fusion, traditional Japanese sounds, folk, jazz and yes even progressive rock to its advantages. Just as JADE WARRIOR are content to play in the tranquil space nebula they also are comfortable on the same album rocking out. This is a great album and one that I play rather frequently.

The Jade Warrior of Last Autumn's Dream is in general a different beast from the New Age/World Music pioneer that it would soon become. To call this work eclectic is to give it too much credit, for it is basically disjointed and imbalanced (which is rather surprising considering that this is the group's third album). Ultimately this record is most notable for some early, if frequently heavy-handed, attempts at the fusion of contrasting musical traditions.

At its best, though, the music of Tony Duhig and Jon Field (this was bassist Glyn Harvard's swan song) can be quite engaging. A Winter's Tale is a hippy campfire song, a sort of union between the Kinks and the earliest Yes material. And the instrumental Dark River has a mournful solo from Field (on some wind instrument I can't identify) that is a real sign of the direction that they would triumphantly embark upon in the future. With its shifting moods and arresting ethnic experimentation, it is by far the most interesting track here.

Some of the pieces are interesing without working that well. Lady Of The Lake uses the melodic inflections of traditional Chinese music, but the ethnic instruments sit uncomfortably alongside the organ washes. May Queen too is a match of ethnic percussion and roots rock, evolving into something resembling jazz-funk, before first flutes, then vibes, then Santana-like guitar lead conclude the piece. The final track Borne On The Solar Wind does echo the melody of A Winter's Tale, but it's too little, too late in terms of giving this album a semblance of cohesion.

Because when this album is bad, it can really be quite unlistenable. Snake is a wah-wah heavy piece .. a surprising early excusion into the unpleasant art of interminable noodling at high speed and volume, while Joanne and Demon Trucker are really poor attempts at a hard rock singles, with fat doses of wah-wah thrown around indiscriminately. These sort of Doobie Brothers-influenced tracks really don't work well at all. As for the instrumental Obedience it starts off well enough but the ethnic percussion soon disappears under the wall of sound created by jarring guitars.

Even at its best, Jade Warrior is not really my cup of tea. And this album isn't Jade Warrior at its best. ... 42% on the MPV scale

The last of the first

Jade Warrior is a unique and interesting British band that started out in the early 70's. Their self-titled debut album had shown some promise but it was still somewhat immature and their second album was a real plodder filled with anonymous and, in my opinion, rather dull Santana-like Latin Jazz-Rock. Here, however, on the group's third album, it all came together for them for the first time. Last Autumn's Dream was in many ways Jade Warrior's peak of the early part of the band's career. It was with this album that they finally managed to pull off what they had only attempted before. The development of their own early sound culminated here and they somehow realized their own musical identity. They also achieved a good balance in terms of different moods, tempos and levels of intensity that makes for a varied yet cohesive album that remains interesting till the end. There are a couple of mistakes though and Joanne and Demon Trucker are the two I'm primarily thinking of here. These two tracks are rather clumsy Hard Rock numbers with lyrics full of clichés. Still, they are not worse than the worst songs from the previous two albums and besides they are short and far enough apart not to bring the album down as a whole.

Admittedly, some parts of this album are a bit raw and the production is not the best in comparison with subsequent albums. But on the quieter moments the sound is pure and points towards what they would do on their next album, Floating World. For that next album, Jade Warrior turned away somewhat from the eclectic and experimental 70's Rock found here and took on more of a New-Age and World-Music approach. The World-Music influences had been present in the band's sound from the start however, and on this album these influences rub shoulders with Jazz, Blues and guitar-based Psychedelic Rock influences to make an appealing mixture. Lots of nice flutes and percussions mixed with more traditional Rock elements to great effect.

If you are looking to investigate Jade Warrior, Last Autumn's Dream is a good place to start and certainly the best of their early period (first three albums).

Improving somewhat from Released, which explored the hard rock side of Jade Warrior in what I thought wasn't a very successful way, Last Autumn's Dream turns its attention to the band's more tranquil aspects, with the notable exceptions of Joanne and (especially) Demon Trucker. The band still haven't quite realised that they're just not cut out for rocking out, but at least on this album the ethereal walls of sound from the debut begin to make a return, and the distinctive, distorted wail of Tony Duhig's guitar is always a joy to hear. It doesn't quite recapture the best aspects of the debut, but it makes up a lot of the lost ground. Three stars.