HAPPY THE MAN

Good music guided primarily by keyboards of David Rosenthal and Frank Wyatt, with good participation of sax and guitar. The pace is mostly slow and placid. The Muse Awakes and Slipstream contain beautiful melodies, well developed through its peaceful course. Kindred Spirits also flows through the same paths. While the music is entirely instrumental, sometimes there is excessive synthesizer solos. Barking Spiders displayed more energy in a jazzy style, with rock sections. Adrift on the other hand, is led by sax and gentler. Shadowlites is the only song sung by Stanley Whitaker, quiet, no big deal. The last mention is for the piece that closes the work, and the largest, Il Quinto Mare. It spans a very good landscape mode described above, with good job of piano, keyboards and guitar, with good arrangements. As always write; depends on the music you want to hear, is a good choice for anyone who enjoys this type of music sometimes. I do.

A solid follow-up to Happy the Man's masterpiece debut. While this album only has one track with vocals, compared to the previous album's two, it doesn't feel tiresome to listen to as one would expect from an almost entirely instrumental album. Crafty Hands only falls short of its predecessor in that the tracks are more repetitive and less wild with the musicianship, speaking of course about tracks like Knee-Bitten Nymphs In Limbo, the likes of which are absent here.

Still, Happy the Man succeeds in bringing back the sound of the first album while exploring enough new ground on Service With a Smile, Wind Up Doll Day Wind, and Open Book. There aren't any truly weak tracks; it just lacks one that's completely off the charts. Shorter, softer, and less ambitious than before, but still an album that's worthwhile for any prog collection.

Service With a Smile: 9/10 Morning Sun: 7/10 Ibby It Is: 8/10 Steaming Pipes: 7/10 Wind Up Doll Day Wind: 8/10 Open Book: 9/10 I Forgot To Push It: 8/10 The Moon, I Sing (Nossuri): 7/10

Total: 8/10

Colorful, Camel-esque space-prog with lots of character.

This is a totally underrated album, as a band's debut this is simply astounding and I wish more people were aware of it! I'm glad to have discovered this rare gem. This is probably the only space-rock (if we must call it that) I've been able to appreciate, as it fills its passages with plenty of time changes, colorful keyboards, and beautiful melodies. Vocals only appear on two tracks, and are actually quite good. I would most compare this album to Camel's Moonmadness.

Starborne: 7/10 Stumpy Meets The Firecracker In Stencil Forest: 9/10 Upon The Rainbow (Befrost): 9/10 Mr. Mirror's Reflections On Dreams: 8/10 Carousel: 6/10 Knee Bitten Nymphs In Limbo: 9/10 On Time As A Helox Of Precious Laughs: 6/10 Hidden Moods: 7/10 New York Dream's Suite: 8/10 Total: 8/10, a great debut.

The history of this legendary US group started in 1972, when guitarist Stanley Whitaker and bassist Rick Kennell met in Germany and shared the same admiration for British Progressive Rock.Whitaker was back in USA by the next year and Kennell, who remained in German grounds for a while, introduced him two of his former bandmates, drummer Mike Beck and singer/flautist Cliff Fortney.The original keyboardists were David Bach and Frank Wyatt, the first was soon to be replaced by Kit Watkins.So Happy The Man were born and in 1974 Kennell was back to USA as well with the band starting full rehearsals.Material from this early 1974-1975 period was released in 1990 under the title ''Beginnings'' by Cuneiform.

The love of HAPPY THE MAN for early British Prog is apparent in every track and actually Whitaker and Kennell were both great fans of KING CRIMSON, GENESIS and VAN DER GRAAF GENERATOR.Noy surprisingy at all these are the main influences dominating the band's early sound with original singer Cliff Fortney sounding a lot like PETER HAMMILL and, to lesser extent, like PETER GABRIEL.The tracks are quite long with plenty of space for nice psychedelic instrumentals, elaborate symphonic arrangements along with a light jazzy breeze.Happy The Man's early sound lacks any kind of full-blown musicianship and the band was focusing on creating dreamy and atmospheric soundscapes, both in vocal and instrumental parts, with nice use of organ, sax and electric piano in the vein of VAN DER GRAAF GENERATOR along with floating synth parts, delicate flute passages and melodic guitar solos in the vein of GENESIS.But a ton of a talent could not been that easily hidden, so there are also plenty of moments, where the sound becomes trully rich with some cool complex themes, highlighted by a VAN DER GRAAF GENERATOR/KING CRIMSON-ian atmosphere with bombastic sax and organ interplays next to demanding keyboard flights and more adventurous guitar hooks.The result was a band with numerous interesting ideas but far from creating their unique personality.

It can get more Classic Prog-styled than this.Of course it is not HAPPY THE MAN's greatest release or, even more, very far from original, but is it a beautiful archival release with a full hour of previously unreleased material of the band's early days and fans of Classic Prog in the vein of the aforementioned legends should track this down.Warmly recommended.

Happy the Man without Kit Watkins is a prospect some fans of the band may feel some trepidation about, and whilst I don't think David Rosenthal does a bad job replacing Kit when it comes to the actual performances, I think the band's compositions on The Muse Awakens suffer a bit from the lack of Kit's contributions. The album is a collection of pleasant enough symphonic prog pieces which don't quite hit the standards of the band's self-titled debut or the classic Crafty Hands, seeming a little airy and insubstantial compared to them. There's lots of technically adept playing, but I'm not seeing where the album's heart is.

It's my understanding that this is, strictly speaking, another Cuneiform archival release from Happy the Man rather than a finished product. The band had produced some demo tapes for their third album - of rather finer quality than those collected on the other archival releases, presumably thanks to their increased studio experience - when their record label unceremoniously dumped them, and then Kit Watkins quit to join Camel and the band dissolved. What is presented here, then, is a cleaned up version of those demo tapes, though they're of a sufficient standard to help work out how the followup to Crafty Hands might have sounded.

And it's also enough to tell that the band were in a severe creative rut at the time. Even accounting for the fact that these are demos, these are some of the most lifeless and apathetic tracks I've heard from the group - a major step down from the preceding classic album. Worst song of the lot has to be The Falcon, mainly because it's another example of the band refusing to admit that they just don't do vocals that well. Perhaps it would have been better had this stayed in the vaults. Perhaps it's best to be glad we had Crafty Hands from these guys and let their less distinguished works fade into obscurity.

Happy the Man's masterpiece takes their unique style to new levels of achievement, at points reminiscent of a blend between the complexity and occasional medieval embellishments of Gentle Giant and the soothing, melodic beauty of Camel circa The Snow Goose. On each of the album's instrumentals (and on the sole vocal track of the release, Wind Up Doll Day Wind) the band's capacity to evoke an atmosphere and remain accessible and catchy even when presenting their most challenging material constantly impresses me. A superb album from a band who came too late to the scene to get widespread attention at the time of release; it's one of those albums for which I'm heavily indebted to the Internet for bringing to my attention.

Orders of magnitude more original than the early material collected in Beginnings and Death's Crown, Happy the Man's self-titled debut album is a prog tour de force, showcasing a style that seamlessly balances accessibility with outbreaks of progressive complexity. It's hard to find many prior bands to compare their sound to, but at points the music suggests the more accessible direction that Camel were groping for at around the same time (which makes Kit Watkins' later tenure as Camel keyboardist make a lot of sense). Fans of relaxing, melodic progressive rock will find a lot to love in this masterful album.

Capturing the entirety of the long-lost Happy the Man conceptual suite Death's Crown (plus a couple of scraps that didn't make it onto Beginnings), this archival release will doubtless excite the interest of those fascinated by the band's history, but isn't really a quality listen compared to their studio albums. First off, the sound quality is really quite poor, being sourced from home demo tapes recorded during rehearsals of the Death's Crown performance (which as I understand it involved dancers and actors as a dinner theatre piece... prog rock dinner theatre, what will they think of next). Secondly, the piece itself just isn't that special. Sure, it's well-played and ticks all the boxes, but it's hardly a dazzlingly original piece - especially considering it was composed well before the band defined their own sound, so it shows a strong Genesis influence. Personally, I'd rather just relisten to Crafty Hands.

This collection of early Happy the Man recordings from their earliest years will doubtless be a must-buy for avid fans of the band who can't get enough Kit Watkins material, but personally I can't recommend it particularly highly. Even setting aside the issues with production quality which are part and parcel of decades-old home recordings such as these (though I must say Cuneiform seem to have done an excellent job of producing listenable mixes from them), the fact is that at this very early stage the band simply hadn't honed their songwriting very much and were still groping towards their distinctive style.

On some songs, they're almost there. Leave That Kitten Alone, Armone, nails the tranquil and mellow atmosphere of some of the best work from the debut or Crafty Hands. Other songs clearly aren't polished products yet, occasionally to a comical extent; Don't Look to the Running Sun comes across as a lazy attempt at Genesis imitation, complete with theatrical-sounding vocals from Cliff Fortney who, bless him, just can't quite pull them off without sounding goofy. The rest of the songs exist between these two extremes. Collectors and fans will be keen on this release, but I can't see it appealing to the rest of us.