HOME

Procol Harum

Crossover Prog

3.57 | 191 ratings

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jammun
Prog Reviewer

Good news, bad news. Home is an excellent rock album. Unfortunately, it's not a very good Procol album, at least in the sense we'd come to expect.

Whiskey Train is a fine, if generic, blues rocker that pretty much every band was putting to vinyl at the time, and is in fact a great way to start the album. Trower's a superb guitarist, no question there, but really, every band and their mothers were cranking out this type of song on a regular basis. It was certainly a new sound for the Procols, but not one that advanced what they had been doing, unless one counts it as a step up from Juicy John Pink.

Which is the general problem here. The songs are solid, the musicianship unassailable, but I don't hear a band that's leading the charge any longer as they were on the previous three albums. This is a set of good rock songs, some (Still There'll Be More, About to Die) being absolutely beyond the average. So then, naturally, one has to wonder what exactly did Matthew Fisher bring to the band that was now lost with his departure from the band? Maybe, just maybe, that is what's responsible for Keith Reid's preoccupation with death on the album, for with the possible exception of Whaling Stories, there's nothing epic here. No In Held Twas In I, no Repent Walpurgis, no A Salty Dog. There's no doubt something was lost, and now it's all tangled up in lawsuits which will go on in Dickensian fashion until all of the principals are no longer with us.

As Reid sez:

Too many poets and not enough rhyme... Draw your own conclusions.

So Procol-wise I can only consider this a disappointment. Nonetheless, it's a good enough album for the time, a cut above what other lesser bands were doing, but sadly not what I'd have expected from this band. I enjoy it certainly, as would any Procol fan. But then, I enjoy some of the albums Savoy Brown was putting out at the time as well.

jammun | 3/5 | 2011-7-2

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