MAGDALENA

This album pre-dates and presages most of the works of Teru's Symphonia with whom they shared vocalist Megumi Tokuhisa, and in fact many parallels exist between the two bands in their bombastic styles and instrumentation, independent of those vocals. Other similarities can be seen to contemporary Japanese groups like Outer Limits and Pale Acute Moon, while Megumi flirts with the histrionics of one Annie Haslam.

Yet to me this is a far inferior product than any of the above. The songs here lack any appeal that extends beyond their boundaries, the bombast is executed without a sense of fun or panache, the solos are aimless and the arrangements are forgettable. Megumi neither purrs softly nor lashes out vindictively as she would later with T.S., instead occupying a limited emotional range in her enunciations of the wordless and the wordy.

While I am tempted to add a star simply for the chutzpah of producing symphonic prog in the mid 1980s, I would have to dock it because efforts like this could have killed the nascent resurgence before it ever got started. Wholly dispensable.