SECOND SIGHT

Way back in 1971 a guy named Bill Fifield was recruited to play drums in the British band Legend. Later that year he would be christened Bill Legend and appear on the debut album from T. Rex. This is not that Legend. These guys aren’t legends at all in fact, except possibly in their own minds. The sound here is pure late eighties/early nineties commercial rock with enough keyboard showboating to make it sound like something remotely progressive to undiscerning listeners. But it’s not – it is mostly commercial fare that probably got more credit than it deserved like other ‘neo’ prog bands of the early nineties, a time when standards were pretty low and this sort of music was able to pass for the real thing.

After from the monotonous keyboards and overdone guitar arpeggios, the vocals are the next worst thing about the record. Debbie Chapman actually sounds like one of those early nineties Canadian guys singing falsetto that consumed the MTV airwaves back then. It took a look at the credits to confirm this is actually a woman singing; no offense meant to her talents, that’s just the way her voice ends up sounding here.

There are a couple of long tracks here that might lead one to believe this is a progressive album, or at least something substantive. But in reality both of them (“The Wild Hunt” and “Mordred”) go on far longer than they need to and don’t amount to much beyond keyboard progressions and spacey vocals intersected at times by lulls in the arrangement filled by even spacier keyboard sounds. There’s a story being told in both cases but I can’t be bothered to take the time to absorb it thanks to the lack of anything interesting in the music. “I Close my Eyes” sounds like a teen pop star singing their personal anthem by the way, and I don’t really mean that in any good way.

Enough here. Not much of an album, forgotten mostly because it should be, and not recommended to anyone but dedicated fans of the band. Two stars fits this one perfectly.

peace

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