HARBOUR OF TEARS

The followup to Dust and Dreams chugs along in more or less the same format - more progressive than The Single Factor and Stationary Traveller, not as interesting as the band's classic work - but adds some Irish folk influence here and there to spice things up a little. Don't get too excited looking at the running time of The Hour Candle - it's not a 23-minute epic, it's a reasonably longish song followed by a quarter of an hour of very quiet sea noises. This is rather needless, since without the ocean sounds the album would have a perfectly reasonable length, but since it's right at the end of the album I won't mark it down. Though I was very irritated the first time I listened to it, expecting a bonus track to emerge after the sea noises, to find no such thing was forthcoming...