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Midnight Sun / ex Rainbow Band - Rainbow Band CD (album) cover

RAINBOW BAND

Midnight Sun / ex Rainbow Band

 

Jazz Rock/Fusion

3.25 | 23 ratings

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Sean Trane
Special Collaborator
Prog Folk
3 stars 3.5 stars really!!!

First album of the group that will change its name just as this album was released (a Canadian band was named that way too), but it came out in the UK and Scandinavia anyway. A sextet (the standard prog quartet, plus a singer and a wind-player) that developed a bluesy jazz-inflicted rock, RB was an amalgam of local Copenhagen musicians from different local groups (although I'd hesitate to call it a "supergroup", even if Burnin Red Invanhoe and later, the superb Secret Oyster would also arise that way),

The opening tracks Where Do You Live and King Of The Sun are average tracks that are rooted in blues-rock and can remind Colosseum, Savoy Brown other late-60's and Early-70's blues-rock. The double track Nobody/BM is easily the first side's highlight with an intriguing piano intro, a haunting flute and fascinating construction. Bronstead's finest hour, if you ask me, in Nobody, while BM is a bit of free space for Stief's bass to extend and ends up in a jam.

Obviously most of the attention on the flipside will be paid to the 14-min+ Living On The Hill, and it does indeed prove to be the album's apex. Built on a mid-tempo blues (this could easily be on Savoy Brown's superb raw Sienna album), the track develops into a large instrumental boulevard where plenty of interplay between Hesselman's winds, Frost's fuzzy guitar lines and Stief's bass. Bronsted is strangely absent/low-key in this track. Ending with Rainbow Song, the album is a pleaser, but by all means never approached anything even remotely groundbreaking.

The proghead could do a good deal by choosing the Long Hair release which holds both version of the album, but gives the preference the Rainbow Band artwork rather than the Dean artwork of Midnight Sun, which is just as well as it is much more charming. After having released this album, the group fired their vocalist and had to change their names, so for odd reasons, they chose to redo their debut album, which this writer thinks was unnecessary, as I prefer this version because of its immediacy.

Sean Trane | 3/5 |

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