PSYCHEDELIC/SPACE ROCK

I knew right away this was not going to be like Ocean or Silent Cries and Mighty Echoes. I didn't even expect it to be like Planets or Time to Turn, their best 1980s albums. It's not bad, although having a real drummer could have benefited big time (listen to Ocean 2 from a decade later, which had a real drummer in Bodo Schopf and you can see the difference). Put this against Ocean or Silent Cries and Ra crashes and burns. Put this up against popular mainstream music of the time like teen bubblegum of the Debbie Gibson and Tiffany variety, or cheesy hair metal of the Bon Jovi, Poison, Whitesnake, and White Lion variety, and this sounds like a breath of fresh air. The music is straight out of the late '80s. Digital synths (including the Yamaha DX-7) and drum machines all over the place, heavy metal guitar riffs (at least more tolerable than cliched hair metal guitar riffs as done by those kind of bands mentioned). There's no denying the intro of "Voyager of the Future Race", a nice ambient piece, and one could have imagine this becoming the Ocean of the '80s, but you know that wasn't going to me. But the album does have some really nice melodies, and not the most offensive of '80s sounds so I did find it enjoyable. Ballads like "Dreams" and "Rainbow" clearly showing them attempting to score a hit, and Frank Bornemann attempts a ridiculous falsetto he never did before, but does on this album (and on Destination and even parts of The Tides Return Forever). I guess this album probably would not have been so trashed on had it been released as a Frank Bornemann & Michael Gerlach album. I guess Bornemann felt that he'd be able to sell more copies by slapping on the Eloy name. I guess if you are strictly '70s for prog rock, you probably should stop at Time to Turn, and avoid anything they done after. But to my ears it's not bad, and I didn't expect it to be like their classics and found it nice listening, but not really essential, so three stars. Love that cover, though (which leaves such bad covers as Yes' 90125 and Big Generator, King Crimson's Beat, Emerson, Lake & Powell's sole album and ELO's Balance of Power totally in the dust).

The music is almost entirely instrumental and was recorded some years ago and features David Gilmour, Nick Mason and Richard Wright together with a bunch of talented guests. Eighteen tracks amongst which the majority are short and atmospheric. On a harmonic and lovely keyboard sound wall are put the confident drums and the typical lyrical guitar which this band is so famous for. The music is slow and it doesn't happen a lot but I must confess it's really pleasant to listen to. Many tracks are a bit too ambient for me but it's still very nice to hear the typical Pink Floyd sound on a 2014 release. My favourite parts are "Louder than words"(10/10) the only song with vocals, and how I wish all songs would have been as good as this. The last song from this band could be one of the classic songs as well. The song has similarities with "Wish you were here" for example. "Sum", "Anisina" and "Allons-y2"(8/10) are amazing tracks with wonderful melodies and fine guitars. "Surfacing"(7/19) is a great opening act for the final track and "Allons-y1"(7/10) makes me feel very satisfied too. All of the other tracks would I rate 5-6/10 and I could easily say that this album is decent from the beginning to the end.

This farewell from this great band thought contains too few masterworks and too many fillers, even if the fillers are quite good. I appreciate that the band made this conclusion and think that the future will give it a more fair judgement. My rating ends at 3.19 which meens three stars. Best song: "Louder than words"

They picked up the sound of their debut album and throwed in some heaviness in the electric parts, as this point the band seems to walk on parallel ways with Belgians QUANTUM FANTAY, introducing space inventiveness, rhythmic guitars and a bit of Folk in a nice Space Rock package.Unlike the Belgians though, their more folky touches, performed mainly on kantele and flute, had a strong oriental edge, recalling the 70's Kraut Folk acts, and creating ethnic soundscapes over cosmic, multi-layered synthesizers and electronics.Drums are very pounding and the guitar-driven parts are quite mascular, they even enter some PORCUPINE TREE-like territories during these heavier moments.The new album even contains a 15-min. long instrumental, ''Tropiikin hedelmia soseena'', divided in four movements and showcasing the Finnish at their most diverse execution.An exchange between powerful riffs and neurotic electronics with ambiental textures and acoustic injections, while parts of the piece sound very melodic and certain guitar moves are inspired by Eastern Music.And after the display of groovy, spacious sounds they have chosen a calm instrumental to close this work, ''Sohvatyynyja jaannöslangoista'', based on soft piano, violin and hypnotic drumming.

Among the interesting groups of modern Space Rock.All these bands had Ozric Tentacles as their guiding light, so do not expect something very personal, but the material is passionate, psychedelic and very, very dynamic.Recommended.

The collection starts off with "Angeldust" which is a great remix done by Steven Wilson of the track "Angel Gets Caught in the Beauty Trap". The remix features guitar and soundscapes from Robert Fripp and it stands out because of the effective use of Frippertronics and improves the original track. It also features sax from Mel Collins (also originally from King Crimson) spotlighted even better than the original track. However, the Flowermouth reissue contains this particular track as a bonus track, so you are just as well off to get the track on that album. The next 3 tracks are "Faith in You" (the first instance of "You Grow More Beautiful" remixed by Prophets of Bliss) which has a hip hop sound that moves into electronic techno territory that to me distracts from the beauty of the original track, "All I See" which is a repetitive remix of "Soft Shoulders" made for the dancefloor and not for casual listening, and "Natural Neck" which doesn't do anything for me. These 3 tracks are not even close to challenging except for the effort it takes to stay interested in the music and they add nothing to the originals.

"Heal the Madness" is a great remix that starts out very atmospheric and builds from a spacey, somewhat ambient sound to a nice beat that actually stays interesting because of the lack of extensive repetitiveness that is overwhelming in the previous 3 tracks. After that you get another version of "You Grow More Beautiful" re written by SW and featuring a funkier sound than the original. This one is probably the only "traditional" sounding song on the entire album and adds a different character to the song than the original without ruining it.

After that, you get 2 more repetitive remixes, "Sample" which is a techno sounding version of "Simple" without any kind of feeling that made the original great, including the fact that the vocal loop from Lisa Gerrard is either missing or pushed so far into the mix that it means nothing, and next is "Why the Noise?" which is a reworking of "Teardrop Fall" with the vocals remaining fairly intact, but it is rougher sounding than the original and more dramatic, but not really worth the effort of the remix.

Last of all is "Born Simple" which is a 12 minute foray into Frippertronic soundscapes and SW electronics and it sounds more like SW's other project Bass Communion than it sounds like a No- man remix. It is a great example of Fripp's atmospheric guitar special effects put to effective use, but it is also available as a bonus track on the original album's reissue, although it is about 3 minutes shorter than the "Flowermix" version.

In my opinion, even with the great tracks on here, it still isn't worth searching this one out. You are better off finding the amazing "Flowermouth" album where at least you get 2 of the 4 better tracks that are on this compilation. The other 2 great tracks are not enough to redeem the rest of the compilation from it's repetitiveness and inability to add much to the original album. Taking this compilation on it's own merits though gives it a good rating, but it really isn't essential especially with the bonus tracks now available on "Flowermouth"

This album is also loaded with guest artists that add to the quality of this music. It's a huge thing first of all that the usual two man crew of Tim Bowness and Steven Wilson are helming the band and we are in capable enough hands right then and there, but you also get so much more here. In "Angel Gets Caught in the Beauty Trap", you get the muted jazz trumpet sounds of the great Ian Carr, in "Shell of a Fighter", you get full on space rock sounds of Wilson's Porcupine Tree co-hort, Richard Baribieri, and in the beautiful "Simple" you get looped vocals of Lisa Gerrard from Dead Can Dance that add to the mystery of that song. On top of that you even get some killer guitar solos from Steven Wilson and plenty of evidence of his involvement throughout the album, even though the overall sound is far from Porcupine Tree, but it is still brilliant.

Okay, so if that isn't enough for you, let's throw in 2 King Crimson greats, Robert Fripp who plays guitar on 5 of the tracks and adds some Frippertronics on 6 tracks (including the 2 bonus tracks) with 'Born Simple' being all instrumental with all Frippertronics and Steve Wilson's electronics making for something that sounds more like Wilson's other project, Bass Communion. Also, Mel Collins from the earlier (and also most recent) incarnations of King Crimson plays sax and/or flute on 3 of the tracks (including a lovely flute solo on the amazing song "Animal Ghost"). What other excuse would you need to check this album out?

The other reason for the importance of this album is the excellent musicianship, production and songwriting prevalent throughout this album. Everything here is utilized and executed wonderfully. The overall sound is atmospheric like I said before but with so much more thrown in to keep it interesting. The entire album, even with all these great musicians participating, is very cohesive even in it's variety. There is plenty here for space rock fans, for electronic fans, for jazz fusion lovers and yes even some passages that would please avant garde fans. All of this is tied together by Tim's vocals and Steven's instrumentation. No-Man was a very talented band, but there were only a few of their albums that were able to reach the essential status. This is one of them. There is quite a varied amount of No-Man material out there, most of it hard to find in the U.S., but this album is definite must-have for Steven Wilson fans, you definitely hear a lot of his influence here. Also, KC or Robert Fripp fans should search out this album because he has so much influence and guest time on this album to be considered a band member.

Very psychedelic at times and very complex and jazzy at others, yet the album is very accessible. This it a great doorway into the music of so many artists, but also for Progressive Rock in general. It is an underrated masterpiece and should be explored by all lovers of the genre.

I'll have to admit that psychedelic music probably isn't among the types of music I have a natural inborn high interest in. The splendid releases from UK label Fruits de Mer Records have certainly opened my mind to the joys of this kind of music, receiving their promo releases for a few years now have given me number of delightful experiences with this specific style of music. But I'm not amongst those that have a natural disposition to like music merely because it is psychedelic in form, style or nature, and I'm probably a bit more critical about such productions than the main fan-base of such ventures.

In this case this leads to what I suspect is a much more critical view of this production than many others have given it or will give it in the future. Because the overall mood of this album is one that will satisfy those with a strong affection for vintage psychedelic music rather instantly I suspect. The production is a closed in one, verging on lo-fi, and comes across as true, natural and organic. My experience with psychedelic music enthusiasts is that those assets are appreciated on a general basis, albums that sounds like they were recorded sometime back in the 1960's. Constant use of resonating instrument effects is a key element, this is an aptly named album in that context, and we have plenty of folk-tinged sequences bordering the pastoral to along with as well as moments that are almost bleeding pure psychedelia. A track like Very Strange Trip as good an example of that as anything. Sleepy, almost spoken like lead vocals with a naive touch and chorus sections that the hippie era written all over them other details that should please dedicated psychedelic music aficionados no end, especially those with a specific affection for the folkier oriented parts of it. That a few textured effects that gave me associations to post rock was thrown in on a couple of occasions a charming addition to this sound, but also one given a more subdued role that doesn't break the mood or the mould of this album. Vintage organ displays and sitar are other elements that will be noted as positive by the core audience for this production I assume.

Personally I find the compositions themselves to be somewhat anonymous however. The sound, mood and atmosphere is just about perfect, apart from the overly sharp esse's and some equally sharp cymbals that stabbed into my eardrum from time to time, but the songs themselves just never managed to grab my attention. Until the very end of this album. The darker, almost sickly sounding Mirror of Our Memories and the almost Gothic nature of the following Reflections of Our Time did catch and maintain my attention. They do stand out from the rest of the songs due to the darker, gloomier and almost menacing atmospheres, those fond of the more naive hippie sound may not appreciate these excursions, that might be more appropriate as soundtracks for walks in the Finnish forests at night time with thick sheets of fog covering the moon and the stars.

Still, the nine minute long creation that concludes this album is in a class of it's own. Listen to the Moths is the name of this elegant, light toned and mystical affair, opening as a sparse folk-oriented affair with frail resonating acoustic guitars and a darker sleepy spoken like lead vocal, followed by a harder edged and more vibrant section and then concludes with soft repeated vocals, soaring psychedelic textures and sparse drum details. The opening two thirds brilliant and magical, the final third not as tantalizing for me personally but one I would guess that fans of acid folk in particular should appreciate highly.

At the end of the day my personal experience of this production is that it is rather uneven, with the final third of this album as my personal highlights. When that is said, I can easily understand if many others will be drawn to this album like the proverbial moth to the flame. Those with a strong affection for psychedelic rock from the late 1960's, and in particular those who treasure and love the moods and atmospheres of that kind of music just as much as they love the music itself. I would guess that those people, presumably many of which would describe themselves as free spirits, will be captivated by this album from the get go. As far as specifying a key audience beyond that description, I'd suggest that fans of Syd Barrett might want to give this one a go.

Turner's passion was Egyptology, a not-uncommon obsession in the 1970's (the young PETER HAMMILL also flirted with Nile River mythology, in the early VDGG song "Boat of Millions of Years"). But nobody captured its arcane essence better than this, and Turner's first album survives today as a near-masterpiece of Space Rock, albeit drawn from the abyss of Time, not Space, and hardly Rock 'n' Roll at all.

You can almost hear the dust of eons in the lonely echoes of his moody flute playing, and with good reason. While on holiday in Egypt, Turner was allowed access to the King's Chamber in the Great Pyramid of Giza, where he recorded three hours of contemplative arabesques to an audience of Fourth Dynasty ghosts. Only later was an album assembled around his taped solos, but the final product is remarkably seamless, with an organic authenticity only a four thousand-year old recording studio can provide.

Even with a long guest roster the sound is almost minimalist, at times resembling an unmixed Hawkwind session stripped of all its other backing tracks. Something like rock music finally appears in the latter half of the album, with actual singing instead of the ritual, rhythmic chanting from the Egyptian Book of the Dead. At its best you might discern a likeness to classic GONG, thanks to contributions from Mike Howlett, Tim Blake, and guitarist Steve Hillage, who also produced the effort, no doubt with a kindred interest in Turner's antique mysticism.

If the Michael Moorcock declamations were your favorite part of Hawkwind's "Space Ritual", here's an ideal album for you. Don't expect to spin it often, but in the right mood and at the right time (perhaps when the star of Sothis appears in the east, and the fertile Nile begins to rise again) the effect can be magical.

I get the temptation to rate this album higher than I would, and perhaps even significantly so. During the sessions for The Division Bell, the Gilmour/Wright/Mason trio recorded a large chunk of instrumental material together, and Wright recorded some snippets on his own that weren't worked into full-band material at the time. Some consideration had been made in the aftermath of The Division Bell of collecting this material and releasing an hour-long instrumental album (tentatively titled The Big Spliff), but the band ultimately decided against it, and this material was shelved. Many years later, after Wright passed away, Gilmour and Mason found themselves feeling nostalgic about their final recording sessions with Wright, and they decided to revisit some of that material. Wright's parts were left mostly undisturbed (though there was some supplemental keyboard work added after the fact), but Gilmour and Mason reworked and added many of their own parts, and they also brought in a good number of session musicians to flesh it out. A curious and potentially intriguing aspect of the material is that, aside from a single new song at the end ("Louder Than Words," which is basically a slower version of "Lost for Words"), the album is entirely instrumental (aside from a couple of sampled vocals here and there), and the instrumental approach often hearkens back as much to the band's pre-DSOTM days as it does to the band's classic period. With the album's strong emphasis on the musical (as opposed to lyrical, which so often has been the main point of emphasis for people in their treatment of the band) legacy of the band, and especially with its emphasis on Rick Wright, it seems like this could work as a nice elegy for the band, and could justify reviving the band's catalogue after it lay dormant for 20 years.

Well, I tried, but I just can't buy into the need for this album to exist. It would be one thing for the various instrumental passages to have some echoes of the band's past, but these passages often mimic the band's history so closely that they sound less like actual music and more like elaborate warmup exercises to help get the band into the right mindset for the material that it would actually record. Among others, this album contains passages that sound like alternate early versions of the following: "Shine on You Crazy Diamond," "Welcome to the Machine," "One of These Days," "A Saucerful of Secrets," "Us and Them," "Comfortably Numb," "Keep Talking" (Stephen Hawking makes another guest appearance) , "Another Brick in the Wall Pt. 2," and "High Hopes." The thing is, the band did something very similar on The Division Bell, and I didn't mind it as much there: whether the band wants to admit it now, it's become pretty clear through the years that the purpose of much of The Division Bell was analogous to the purpose of much of Wish You Were Here, and all of the various stylistic cribs on that album made sense. Here, without any clear conceptual framing, the album ends up sounding like a series of unfinished fragments superglued together and justified as "atmospheric," and while I'm somebody who tries to give atmosphere the benefit of the doubt, I can't do it in this case. That said, there is an interpretation for this album that I found can give it a little more weight and cohesion: the album could be heard as Pink Floyd on its death bed and seeing/hearing its life flash before its eyes, with all of its various musical memories flickering by before giving way to oblivion. Hearing the album this way doesn't exactly save it for me, but it can make it a little more palatable. That said, even with this interpretation in mind, I still can't get all the way beyond the slight creepiness factor of Gilmour and Co. playing karaoke over a bunch of keyboard parts that Wright wouldn't be able to tweak in response to their suggestions; it's the closest thing in the world of art rock that I can think of to using Fred Astaire to sell vacuum cleaners.

Still, while I find the album unnecessary and a bit of a put-on, there's still something mildly intoxicating about hearing Gilmour and Wright (I'm ignoring Mason because he doesn't distinguish himself; I'd be shocked if that's actually him playing on "Skins," for instance) interacting (in a manner of speaking) one more time, even if it's in the context of second-rate imitations of the band's glory days. I should also note that the album works better as a series of extended suites (split up in the way the LP version splits the material across four sides) than as a series of tracks (often very short) that only stick around long enough to noodle a bit but not long enough to make a great impression. I'd rather listen to this than A Momentary Lapse of Reason (which has some genuinely good material but also a good chunk of material that's much worse than anything here), but if I want to listen to something that reminds me of the glory years of Pink Floyd, then I'll listen to something from the glory years of Pink Floyd.