DEFECTOR

Steve Hackett

Eclectic Prog

3.66 | 540 ratings

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infandous

This album starts brilliantly, and ends......well, not so brilliantly.

The Steppes is a great Hackett instrumental, displaying much of the style and substance of the title track of the previous album. The rest of the album, however, doesn't do as much for me. Once again, Pete Hicks takes the vocal slot, with Hackett doing a bit of singing as well. The album is consistent, but unfortunately for me, this isn't as good a thing as it was on the last album. Still, this is by no mean bad and I would rank it above Please Don't Touch on the whole (even if the that album has a couple tracks I like more than anything on this album).

Frankly I'm finding it hard to recall details of each song, despite having heard the album just 2 days ago, so I won't do a song by song review. The exceptions are the opener, which I discussed a bit above, and the closer, which I generally don't listen to. It is a song I don't really understand the purpose of and simply find a bit annoying to listen to. However, the rest of the songs are up to Hackett's usual standards and certainly are quality material (with the now obligatory classical guitar piece being one of the highlights).

On the whole, I think this album rates about a 4, with one star off for the final track. It is much more consistent than Please, but less appealing to me than Spectral. So a worthy addition to any Hackett collection, and probably to any prog collection as long as you've heard Spectral (or Voyage) first. After this it seems Hackett would take something of a dip in quality, judging from the ratings for the next couple of albums. I have not heard those so can not judge. But if this is the case I suppose this was a good way to end his initial quite good 4 album run.

infandous | 4/5 | 2008-5-20

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