REALITY

Second Hand

Psychedelic/Space Rock

3.05 | 26 ratings

From Progarchives.com, the ultimate progressive rock music website

It kind of pains me to give a small rating to this album. The tracks Mainliner and Reality are ambitious prog/psych epics with some very good instrumental sections.

But these guys were a new band just taking their first steps.They were barely 18 when laying this stuff down. Most of this stuff is 60's pop-rock, but really quirky. In the remastered CD I have Ken gives a little detail in the notes about what the songs are about. Well he may know what he's saying, but I can't figure out what he's saying. He's a weak singer in the first place and when his vocals get lost in the mix that doesn't help either. The best of the quirky pop-rock gems is the opening cut 'fairy-tales', some that ensue have good riffs and a semi-respectable chorus, but to over-analyse this album too much is silly; this was their 'starting point', and they were supposed to build on this. Remember the first Genesis album? You get my point.

Some people have come back to this album and claimed it to be a 'masterpiece', which is wrong. Like the music critic says in the liner notes "Second Hand are a group with a lot of potential". This is not a group 'at it's peak', yet the liner notes where Ken says that this is a wonderful album and it failed 'cause good music doesn't succeed is a bit rich. No sense of self-criticism or reflection? Maybe if you had done that, you might have realised that this music was very flawed. It has a lot of potential and has buckets and spades of artistic ambition, which is a good thing, but the band aren't gelling well, and the music sounds 'drunk' and the lyrics are very hard to understand. Work on those problems and you might have come up with some winners, oh well you released another four albums, but a lot of the bands' problems never went away.

Still, this album shows the band has a lot of potential, A LOT, but without proper guidance or record company interest, they never really achieved the potential.

Brendan | 2/5 | 2010-4-23

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