RECYCLED

I recently raised my rating for Remember The Future from three to four stars, and so I feel that I will have to do the same for Recycled. Just like Remember The Future, this is a slightly psychedelic piece of conceptual, quite hard rocking but melodic music. But unlike that album the instrumentation is much richer here. While the music on Remember The Future contained basically just the traditional instruments - electric guitar, bass, drums and organ - Recycled has, in addition, piano, lots of synthesisers and a choir! These additions put Nektar closer to Symphonic Prog than they were in the past.

The synthesisers are played by Larry Fast, a guest musician. And he is pretty fast too! But there is little room for long solos in the well structured and carefully arranged music, but more so than on Remember The Future. The bass sound is loud and strong throughout and this further puts the sound of Nektar closer to their Symphonic colleagues.

Just like on Remember The Future, some moments are soft and mellow, others are loud and hard rocking, yet others are almost funky or psychedelic. The lead vocals are stronger here and the added choir make up for whatever inadequacies the lead vocalist might have. The lyrics are quite interesting too. I will not tell you about the concept, try figure it out for yourself; I'm not too sure about it actually, apart from that is has something to do with environmentalism (an "ism" I am not very connected to at all, but I do not find the lyrics annoying).

The overall sound and production is better and clearer than on previous albums and all the instruments sound very good.

Recommended, and together with Remember The Future (I cannot quite decide which of these two is the better album) this is probably one of the very best albums of the whole Psychedelic/Space Rock sub-genre (not the best example of that genre though, since this is close to Symphonic Prog).