PORK

The critical acclaim of Taylor's Universe's debut was a nice push for Robin Taylor to immediately starting working on a follow-up album.The standard trio of Taylor, Marsfeldt and Hansen was again helped by trumpetist Hugh Steinmetz and for the first time female singer Jytte Lindberg appears on a Taylor's Universe album.''Pork'' was recorded between 1994 and spring 1995, I guess Marvel of Beauty Records was not on full operation by the time, as the album was finally shelved for selling early in the next year.

The diverse and varied elements apparent on the band's debut are still the main forces on this album, but unfortunately ''Pork'' sounds a bit like a mess, the sound ends up to be more experimental than properly structured, now borrowing some elements from the laid-back stylings of PINK FLOYD, like the smooth guitar plays and the soft organs, and throwing them into an abstract and chaotic collage of Fusion, R.I.O. and Industrial palettes.The album still retains some very interesting, cool passages with lovely jazzy orientations, but all this unrelated stuff coming from acts like KING CRIMSON, RASCAL REPORTERS, PINK FLOYD and PASSPORT are far from tight and more on the loose side of music.Odd synth experiments, highly distorted wordless voices, proggy overtones, Latin-spiced echoes and EKSEPTION-like Horn Rock values are hard to be comnbined and the overall atttempt here is trully sincere, but fails to deliver.Too many stretched themes with dominant trumpets, nonsense vocal experiments and absence of melody make ''Pork'' a hard pill to disgest.Expecting some good material on the long ''Another rainy day'', but these extended opening bells, sound effects and minimalistic vibes lower its value, even if the following section with the beautiful FLOYD-iang uitar work and the atmospheric keys is definitely attractive.

Not an album I would easily recommend.It's too loose and obscure, lacking direction and strong structures, making it far from an easy task.Thus, this would be appreciated by fans of the more experimental and jazzy side of Prog Rock.