THE LAST BATTLE

Haze are, like Solstice, one of those first-wave neo-prog bands who never quite clicked with me and always kind of felt that they'd been lumped in with the neo-prog cloud by accident. At most they seemed to just play mildly psychedelic melodic rock hampered by middling production values, somewhat naive lyrics, and not especially interesting or varied song structures. Now, after a long hiatus, they've returned for a new album, and guess what: they've brought all their bad habits back with them.

To an extent, this is inevitable, since as far as I can tell a high proportion of these songs are bits and pieces from the archives of Haze (or various other Haze-related projects) given a dust- off and a new recording. However, the mildly improved production values only demonstrate how little these compositions had to offer in the first place. Meh.