THE SNOW GOOSE

CAMEL is a special case for me, they have everything I like from a Prog band, their members are incredibly skilled, the music has coherence, is well elaborate and has the precise balance between complexity, melody and experimentation, in other words, and being a Symphonic fan, CAMEL should be one of my favourite bands.............But they aren't, I feel like their music needs more energy, strength and risk, they seem to play safe, the music is beautiful but a bit tame for my taste.

I used to avoid all their albums, until I bought "Moonmadness" which I found amazing, so why shouldn't I give a chance to The Snow Goose, a conceptual album based in the short story by Paul Gallico, but due to the hatred of the author towards cigarettes, and believing CAMEL had relation with the tobacco company, opposed to the use of lyrics that referred to his book, so CAMEL had to change the name to "Music Inspired in the Snow Goose" to avoid legal consequences.

This fact affected the album, it had to be instrumental and not even narration allowed, so the music had to be really descriptive to make sense, but sadly it isn't, the album is practically a whole long song with incredible beautiful passages and excellent performances, but is as boring as watching the grass grow,

I find no energy, no strength, the music consists in endless repetitions of previous passages, so after 5 minutes, there's nothing new, and in my case I wanted to burn the album, the excessive care for details of the members of CAMEL; made "The Snow Goose", so clean and chemically pure that is tedious.

The band seems to ignore that Rock is young, risky and strong, instead they dedicate their time to create beautiful but lame repetitions of the same music, over and over, there's no wild power, young strength only careful pieces of music with beauty but no life.

If it wasn't for the Jazzy "Migration" and the mystic but powerful "Flight of the Snow Goose", I would had gone to bed earlier, because the only thing "The Snow Goose" produces me is somnolence, but this two tracks gave me some hope to listen the album until the end.

Now comes the difficult part, the rating......It's very difficult to give a low rating to an album that has wonderful melodies and clear demonstration of skills, but this is Progressive ROCK and any form of Rock requires freedom, strength, and, energy, not only careful beauty that lacks of life.

My advice...Stay with Moonmadness", the only CAMEL album that doesn't work as a pill of Vallium