ALL OF US

The short-lived ‘band’ version of Nirvana was gone by the time the studio sessions for this album commenced, although there are a handful of tracks with the former bassist, cellist and French horn player. The rest are made up of the original band duo of Patrick Campbell- Lyons on vocals and most of the guitar work, and Alex Spyropoulos on keyboards (and a fair bit of the song arrangements).

This album gets a lot of gushy praise for the opening “Rainbow Chaser”, and particularly for the ambitious string arrangements. Those of us who grew up on ELO are probably a bit jaded when it comes to strings in rock music, but for the time period this was pretty innovative stuff. The rest of the album isn’t quite as grand, although a few tracks like “Melanie Blue” and especially “Girl in the Park” (my personal favorite on the album) are also great examples of tasteful melding of mildly progressive pop and real orchestral strings. There are a few places where I’m pretty sure the ‘strings’ are actually a Mellotron, but for the most part these are the real deal.

While the duo’s first record was a concept album, this one is simply a collection of pleasantly poppish tunes though in much the same vein as their debut. The record spawned a handful of singles with “Rainbow Chaser” managing to break into the Top-40 the year of its release. There isn’t a ton of variety here and some forgettable moments like the rather tepid “Trapeze”, but in all the record at least has some continuity of sound and is a great example of what was a fairly popular sound at the time. One other song worth noting is the mellow and flute-laced “The Show Must Go On”, another heavily stringed piece with very nice violin and cello accompaniment.

I have to rate this album about the same as their first, which was also good but not great, so three stars it is. This is a band that had their fifteen minutes of fame in the latter sixties but hasn’t aged all that well. Still, I’ve started to hear groups emerge even today that trade on the breakthrough sounds of bands like Nirvana (Pugwash and the Moore Brothers come to mind), and while I’m not sure Nirvana influenced them the fact that the same sort of easy pop rock with traces of orchestral and psych influences persist today mean the sound is still attractive to at least some folks. Mildly recommended if the words above intrigue you at all.

peace