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Renaissance - Turn of the Cards CD (album) cover

TURN OF THE CARDS

Renaissance

 

Symphonic Prog

4.15 | 745 ratings

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siLLy puPPy
Special Collaborator
PSIKE, JRF/Canterbury, P Metal, Eclectic
4 stars This is the album where I find RENAISSANCE fully came of age. Most likely due to the fact that for once in their entire existence they had two consecutive albums with the same lineup. This stability meant that they could finally focus on the music at hand and refine it to some squeaky symphonic perfection. True that they may have never had a diverse range of sounds in their symphonic prog and you can tell how they recycle a riff here and a run there but even though they were basically a one-trick pony in the composition department they nevertheless were quite good at that one trick.

This actually makes sense since this band was basically manufactured by the management and not a product of organic collaboration. This band in that sense is no different from bands like the Monkees, so if you look at it like that then it's totally logical that they stuck to the playbook. A lot of the classical piano pieces are actually reworkings or excerpts from traditional classical pieces and the fact that Jim McCarty songs are still finding their way onto albums proves that anything is fair game for inclusion.

Despite all that I still find the music of RENAISSANCE to be a pleasant type that actually works for me and I actually prefer this album a lot better than its predecessor despite it not being a whole lot different. A lot of the sappiness is gone and replaced by some pure melancholy, which suits this type of music and makes it more appealing to me. "Mother Russia" for example is dedicated to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who was a Russian writer and activist. The songs feel a little deeper and the band seems a little more comfortable in their stable lineup. Point blank, a beautifully orchestrated album.

siLLy puPPy | 4/5 |

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