Moody Blues: Days of Future Passed

I love the album, some great songs (Tuesday Afternoon!) and some very cheesy orchestral sections. Not quite the orchestra/rock band merger and it's mainly songs with orchestral bits in between.

chopper wrote: I love the album, some great songs (Tuesday Afternoon!) and some very cheesy orchestral sections. Not quite the orchestra/rock band merger and it's mainly songs with orchestral bits in between.

Exactly so. Its hardly any fusion of band + orchestra to be found and I think it would be a stronger album without those kitschy "light classical" interludes. But the actual songs are all wonderful.  

Evolver wrote: "Aches are Burning"?  When did Renaissance write about arthritis?

 Damn auto correct!

Saperlipopette! wrote: chopper wrote: I love the album, some great songs (Tuesday Afternoon!) and some very cheesy orchestral sections. Not quite the orchestra/rock band merger and it's mainly songs with orchestral bits in between. Exactly so. Its hardly any fusion of band + orchestra to be found and I think it would be a stronger album without those kitschy "light classical" interludes. But the actual songs are all wonderful.

I agree with you both on the lack of a fusion, but at least DOFP had orchestral sections that sounded like movements and has a type of finale. And that's more than what Renaissance did with their "orchestras".

Edited by SteveG - August 30 2018 at 11:12

I like the album, I prefer the way that The Who's Tommy (1969) was orchestrated (and better yet, the arrangements for the Atom Heart Mother suite). Keith West's Excerpt from a Teenage Opera in 1967 is interesting.

Logan wrote: I like the album, I prefer the way that The Who's Tommy (1969) was orchestrated (and better yet, the arrangements for the Atom Heart Mother suite). Keith West's Excerpt from a Teenage Opera in 1967 is interesting.

I just got Days of Future Passed a few years ago, and I do love it. Though indeed I could do without most of the orchestral bits... as well as the spoken words. I wonder how the early live versions when they played the songs that ended in the album sounded (or if they played the complete album live before or after it was released).

And Graham Edge's closing poem, recited by Mike Pinder! It's still startling after 50 years!

Edited by SteveG - August 31 2018 at 04:33

I think calling some music dated is very subjective thing. Also seemed already many years to be the way to try to make people think some old music is not important, at least as important as some new music.

Mortte wrote: I think calling some music dated is very subjective thing. Also seemed already many years to be the way to try to make people think some old music is not important, at least as important as some new music.

I don't think its all subjective. There are some dated approaches to making music that has died out because "we" (not as in everyone in the whole world but in general) can no longer relate - the orchestral cheese in Days of Future Passed being one of them. A rock tune with a drum solo taking up most of its duration? It just doesn't happen anymore. Not even live. Such excess belongs to the era of the "rock genius". Musicians still make jazz fusion but not in the smoothest, w**kiest, cocaine-induced late 70's-early 80's kind of way. Another example can be that hardly anybody sings with intense vibrato anymore but it was fashion for decades in classical music.