IN THE LAND OF GREY AND PINK

My first taste of Caravan music (my second was If I could do...). When I listened to it for the first time the olny thing I actually knew of them was that they were sharing some musicians with Camel. But I found something amazing, starting from the album cover. On the Vinyl edition you can spend some time looking for hidden faces in the picture. Try. The album opens with "Golf Girl". The rhythm is quite unusual and I think this song has some contact points with the British glam of that era. Looking back to "If I could do..." the two albums have very similar openings. "Winter Wine" is a masterpiece. Acoustic guitar and voice bring you to the land pictured in the cover, then Drums and Bass suddenly start the main part of the song in the most possible "progressive" way. Good guitar riffs, impressive bass line. This is one of my top ten songs of all times. "Love to love you" is as counterpart, the weakest point of the album. A pop song with apparently trivial lyrics, good for the B-side of a single. Luckily the following title track is not that bad. It's just the closure to the A side of the album and contains some interesting gimmicks. I think the "voice of a friendly gorilla" mentioned on the album's is one of them. "Nine feet underground" Is the about 23 minutes epic. It's a medley of several different parts that are in general well fading one into the other except for the explosion that changes a slow part into something different (I can't tell which of the parts are they. I suppose it's the passage from "Hold grandad by nose" and "Honest I did"). Another remarkable part is when the tempo is doubled (make it 76?) by the bass. This is one of the few epics that I can listen to for two consecutive times without getting tired of it (the other is Atom earth mother). It's in my top ten albums but the sound is very dated so I'm not sure about rating it 5 or just 4 stars. Being its average rating 4.32 I keep it high and go for 5.