SILENT CRIES AND MIGHTY ECHOES

This album really took me by surprise. I wasn't expecting much from an album in 1979, a really bad time for prog rock, but ELOY seemed to have forgotten about the changes in trends in the music scene, and proceeded to give us another great album. "Astral Entrance" sounds so much like a missing part of "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" that you might think it was a "Wish You Were Here" outtake, but that's all out the window the minute you hear "Master of Sensation", and Frank Bornemann's accented vocals. "The Apocalypse" is definately the album's high point, which is a suite, it's largely an instrumental piece loaded with great Moog and string synths. "De Labore Solis" is another one of those ridiculously string synth heavy pieces that's not unlike Ocean's "Incarnation of Logos".

I could hardly believe anyone made prog rock this great in 1979. It's too bad this was ELOY's final album with Jürgen Rosenthal and Detlev Schmidtchen, because I thought ELOY made their best and most interesting albums with them.