SILENT DANCE

This UK formation was founded in 1980, they toured a lot (many gigs in the famous London Marquee), performed on known festivals like Reading and Stonehenge and even played live in the BBC radio studio. Their debut album entitled Silence Dance (1984) was released in the heydays of the neo-prog, speerheaded by Marillion with IQ and Pendragon in their slipstream. Recently the record company has rereleased their entire back-catalogue, remastered and featuring lots of previously unreleased material. This reissue of Silent Dance contains 2-CD's.

Listening to the melodic and pleasant sound of Solstice, the folky elements are very obvious in often mellow climates with frequent use of the violin and acoustic guitar and lots of attention for the vocal parts. One singer often reminds me of Jon Anderson and the female singer evoked Annie Haslal (Renaissance), very beautiful. In the song Brave New World the band showcases their symphonic prog potentials in a very impressive way: interesting shifting moods, lush keyboards (including the distinctive string-ensemble), sensitive electric guitarplay, a nice synthesizer solo and those majestic Moog Taurus bass pedals, very compelling! I had loved to hear that symphonic prog side by Solstice more often, now it sounds a bit too folky for me (and many neo-progheads didn't know what to think about Solstice). CD-2 contains music from the three 'cassette releases' (two from 1982 and one from 1983), a demo tape from 1983 (song Sunrise) and a BBC concert entitled Friday Rock Show (1983). On the first cassette Solstice plays in a four piece line-up with an omnipresent violin (not unlike German prog band Hoelderlin, although that's a viola, haha) along some delicate guitar solos. The second cassette presents singer Sue Robinson with her Gaelic voice and on the third cassette we hear singer Sandy Leigh who also performed on the Silent Dance LP. To me the cassettes and demo tape no more or less than nice and especially interesting for the Solstice fans. Really interesting are the four songs of the Friday Rock Show concert, including the wonderful symphonic prog track The Sea, I don't understand why it was deleted for the album! The final composition is the funny country & western sounding Cannibalistic Legalis delivering sparkling violin and propulsive rhythm-guitar.

This 2-CD version is a good opportunity to discover Solstice their unique sound, especially if you like folk. My rating: 3,5 stars.