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Corvus Stone - Corvus Stone CD (album) cover

CORVUS STONE

Corvus Stone

 

Crossover Prog

3.80 | 181 ratings

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lazland
Prog Reviewer
3 stars This is a sprawling album lasting just a shade short of 80 minutes by an international collective of very talented musicians. If you had to provide a word to best describe it, I think that ambitious would probably best fit the bill.

There really is a bit of everything in here, as other reviewers have noted correctly. From Purple influenced classic rock, to jazz, to blues, to pure symphonic prog, it can, in truth, be a very bumpy ride on the first couple of listens, and I have, therefore, taken quite a bit of time before sitting down at my keyboard to review this.

Let us, then, deal with the main positive feature which shines from this album, and that is the superb musicianship and production. The keyboards of Koivu, the guitars of Tench, and the bass and multi instruments of Lindstrom are, to a fault, exceptional, and I have also been deeply impressed by the complex drumming exhibited by Robert Wolff. In addition, a highlight of this is also the contribution on vocals made by Blake Carpenter, who released earlier this year the sublime The Minstrels Ghost, on which Tench contributed. I should also, by the way, make special mention of the excellent artwork on the cd by Sonia Mota.

This album is a labour of love, of that there is no doubt. There are passages which are simply sublime, with the ten minute Cinema being my personal favourite. This features some deeply moving and evocative guitar work, both electric and acoustic, with a very complex keyboard solo much in the mould of classic Wakeman from an era long ago.

So, there are many positives here. The negative, to me, is that it is perhaps just a little too ambitious in the way the band try to bring together so many different styles and influences into one long piece, so that it is, even after a number of listens, somewhat incoherent as an album. It certainly, to my mind, would have benefited from being a good ten to twenty minutes shorter, and is, certainly, not the sort of album you are going to play continuously on a regular basis, not unless, of course, you have far too much time on your hands. Rather, I feel I will find myself dipping in and out when I play this. For example, I have the beautiful You're So Wrong almost permanently on my iPad playlist, with its lovely vocals interplaying with a dreamy backdrop by the band.

So, to rating this. I, for one, will be interested to see how this project develops, because there is so much great promise herein, and, having communicated with some of the protagonists, can say they are as lovely a bunch of artists you could possibly hope to have.

I see this, therefore, as being a stepping stone to great things in the future, a marker laid down, if you will. It is, to these ears, a very good album, so three stars (3.5 if we had such a rating).

My thanks to Colin Tench for sending me the cd to review.

lazland | 3/5 |

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