NO ALTERNATIVE

2,5 stars, really. Promising debut work by this english outfit that makes a quite elaborated heavy prog. Their sound is not very original on this album, but at least they prove they are capable of bigger things in the future. The use of a mellotron to make it sound like a Hammond organ is interesting, but hardly better than the real thing. I was told they have King Crimson influences, but you wouldn´t tell that judging by No Alterntive. Ok, there are some nice mellotrons runs but so do many other bands at the time. The KC parts might lie in their latter effords.

The instrumentation is very good, although I found the songwriting here a bit too common. Vocals are only average at best, even if the lyrics seem to be quite clever. The group does not seem to know exactly where they are going to and it shows. The last track for example is a funky number that seems to be more like what Chicago was doing at the time than to anything King Crimson ever did. But the songs themselves are ok.

Since I had an old vinyl copy of the album, I can´t say anything about the CD sound, if it improved the overall quality or not. The original production was only adequate.

Conclusiom: interesting debut, but still green. It makes you want to hear their follow ups to see how much far Jonesy went.