UP ABOVE OUR HEADS [CLOUDS 1966-71]

Clouds........ who ? I had no idea who this band was until two months ago. I did an interview with them and purchased this 2 cd's box from Amazon. Then I got stucked into their world and reviewed their three albums. All of them included here.

Let's start with the packaging here. This box includes one of the best ever booklets I have seen. It is the full Clouds story, compiled and written by one guy called David Wells. Excellent job, David ! The Clouds story is excellent written and includes a lot of very useful stuff. It is a booklet you cannot stop reading if you have started on page. It is that well written. Hence, this booklet is alone worthy a purchase. The booklet also includes the lyrics and linear notes for each individual albums and the extra tracks. It is obvious that the record label BGO Records has spared no money to get this box perfect. That also goes for the sound which is spotless and absolute perfect, as far as I gather on my office stereo rack. Maybe if you put this box on a $ 25 000 stereo rack, the sound may not be perfect. But it is perfect on my rack. The result is a very impressive box which I seriously wish should be copied by other labels too. All praise to BGO Records for this job.

There are 2 cds here. The first CD includes their first two albums Scrapbook and Up Above Our Heads. The latter album was only released in USA and Canada, but never in Europe and world wide. Hence; this is the first world wide release of this album. The sound on the two albums has very probably been cleaned up from the LPs. Which is both fair and right. You will find my reviews of these two albums somewhere else on these pages. But let me shortly ad that they and their music in general sounds like a crossbreed between The Beatles (who was also managed by Clouds manager Brian Epstein) and The Nice. The music is very much Hammond organ based and we are talking Proto Prog here in it's truest sense.

The second CD contains their third album Watercolour Days and nine bonus tracks. I again refer to my review of the album. The nine bonus tracks are the A and B side of a single, unreleased material and their version of Simon & Garfunkel's massive hit America, later also covered by Yes. Their version was probably spurred on by Clouds, or 1-2-3 as they were called back then. I very much prefer Clouds version which has a lot more bite and meat than the Yes version. In short, the nine bonus tracks is all great and would had made a great album.

In short; this is an excellent documentation of a band who influenced David Bowie, Keith Emerson, The Nice, ELP and scores of other artists and bands. The price of this box is also very reasonable too. It is therefore close to being an essential purchase for any prog head with a bit of self respect. I am a very happy owner of this box which goes straight into my top 5 of the alltime best compilation boxes. Hence some awarded stars.

4 stars

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