LADY LAKE

With this album, it sounded more like Gnidrolog should have been ready to break out into the wider world, not fade away into obscurity. Their debut album, the oddly named "In Spite of Harry's Toenail", was already excellent, and on this one, they seem to have focussed their sound just a bit more. Also, the album art was much better ;). Unfortunately, this would be their last album for almost 30 years.

The music is still influenced by blues and a little bit by hard rock. But, in the first half of the album especially, the tracks appear to be more controlled than in their previous albums, the structures more defined. As before, the shorter tracks (A Dog With No Collar, Same Dreams) sit among the quieter side, but are still good tracks.

Lady Lake, the albums title track, shows Gnidrolog incorporating some more prominent jazzy influences into their sound. As far as I am concerned, this is just another reason why the bands demise was a shame - they were releasing great music from the start but also showed a willingness to grow and experiment, and if they had survived longer, they probably would have released some truly amazing music. They never quite released a masterpiece, but I feel confident that they would have. It took Yes five albums before they released a full-out masterpiece, and Gnidrolog started a fair bit closer to achieving this than Yes did on their first two albums. They may have been just one away.

Pointless conjecture aside, Lady Lake does more than demonstrate Gnidrolog's growth as an artist, it is an excellent track in it's own right, featuring everything from the jazzy intro to moody vocals and an extended instrumental section at the end.

It is impossible to mention this album without mentioning the opening tracks, I Could Never Be A Soldier and Ships. To me, these tracks are not quite as experimental as Gnidrolog could be, relying more on the strength of choruses than anything else the band had done, but that does not stop them from being damn good tracks. Each is tinged with emotion and some form of sorrow. I Could Never Be A Soldier reflects on the fallacy of war and the difficulty of viewing another human being as intrinsically evil, while Ships seems to be more about living with the mistakes of ancestors (at least, that's how I interpret it).

Compared to their opening, this album is somewhat more consistent with more high quality tracks, but it lacks anything that's quite as good as Snails off of their debut. Despite this, the album is great from beginning to end, and the fact that the bands career ended here (not counting their eventual reformation) is truly a shame.