NEAR THE BEGINNING

Vanilla Fudge hit on something special with Renaissance, especially with their haunting take on Donovan's Season of the Witch which closed out the album and could almost be seen as a precursor of Black Sabbath's early doom style.

Unfortunately, with this album they lost all the character and atmosphere and presented a rather generic psychedelic rock record crammed to the gills with somewhat aimless noodling. Break Song, in particular, is a side-length live jam that just consists of wanky solos of a type we've all heard before dozens of times (including an absurdly overlong drum solo) which more or less encapsulates all the worst aspects of that particular performance format.

This is an album which time has not treated well; it's dated extremely badly, particularly now that if you wanted you could get similar live jams from better performers in massive quantities at a very reasonable price. Thanks, guys, but no thanks.