POWER AND THE PASSION

PATP has been Eloy's first concept album and it marked a shift in their sound from psychedelic space rock as demonstrated on Inside/Floating into more bombastic symphonic territory. The story behind this album is actually not really an interesting but rather mawquish one about some time-travelling romance but those were the days of fantasy themes in Prog. The music is accordingly quite overblown as well and moves between bombastic synthesizer tunes and Hammond/guitar dominated hard rock sound. Side one of the original vinyl is still the better with the spheric "Mutiny" being one of the few highlights of this album. The melancholic "The Bells of Notre Dame" closing side two might be the other one. But most of the remaining tracks on here are offering solid, not really bad but as well not terrific and rather mediocre symphonic Prog in the shadow of names like Pink Floyd, Camel and Mike Oldfield. Significantly the band dissolved soon after the release and Bornemann would find a complete new line-up for the following albums which would be in the same style presented here just done much better. This one here might be interesting for some people liking lush and bombastic symphonic prog but for this I'd rather recommend their later albums like Dawn, Ocean or Planets. Quite good, but not really an essential Eloy - album!