NINE SONGS OF JOHN LENNON

Nine Songs Of John Lennon is Polish band Collage´s second album. As the title suggests it´s made up of 9 interpretations of John Lennon songs. With albums that solely consists of cover songs two things have to be in place to fully enjoy the experience. First and most importantly you have to like the band who is playing the songs which means in this case Collage. To this I can say Yes. The second thing that has to be in place is that you have to like the original artist at least to some degree. To this I can only say partly and therefore this is a mixed experience for me.

The music is a strange mix of the original vocal lines from John Lennon songs like Imagine, Give Peace a Chance, Cold Turkey and The Beatles tune Tomorrow Never Knows and neo progressive arrangements with lots of melodic guitar leads and solos. I think the neo progressive style is great when it´s played by Collage. They really understand how to play this style but the John Lennon sections are not especially to my liking and that is because I never really liked the originals. Yes they are pop/ rock evergreens and some of them are beautiful, but this is just not my prefered style. Another thing I´m not too impressed with the voice of Robert Amirian which I think is a bit weak.

The instrumental musicianship and the arrangements of the songs are the two reasons for getting this album because as always Wojtek Szadkowski plays his strange anarcistic drumming style, Krzysztof Palczewski lays everything to waste ( this is a positive remark) with his monumental keyboard work and Mirek Gil plays his beautiful guitar leads inspired by such greats as Alex Lifeson, Steve Rothery and David Gilmour.

The production is a bit thin but it´s not useless though.

I´m gonna have to give this 2 stars because there are too many things I don´t like about the album to really call it good. There are parts in every song that deserves at least a 3 star rating but overall the album gets 2.