TALES FROM ANOTHER TIME

Many years ago I was hosting a dinner with some fairly discerning guests, and one of them threw a suggestion at me that was vague and amorphous; from it arose my ultimate culinary triumph with the compliments flowing faster than would have been necessary as mere positive reinforcement. Odd that I never took the time to register what I had done so, you know, I could have replicated it for somebody I really needed to impress instead of the rock cod bones strewn with flesh that I was stuck on for the next decade. But maybe deep down I knew that it could never be replicated anyways, and so I allowed the legend to live on rather than be extinguished by over exposure, or any exposure at all. It strikes me how much ERIS PLUVIA's debut album from 1991 is like that shrouded repast, glorious and perhaps imitable but not replicable. It established an atmosphere and a substrate just solid enough to be skipped upon in between soaring interludes. As near perfect an album as I can think of, its success proved such a curse that the surprisingly accomplished successor lay 20 years in the future. Since then, well, the sound is all there but the magic has well and truly dwindled.

You've got the flutes, the sensitive vocals, including female as necessary, that could pass for stoned but probably have to do with the intonations of a non native speaker, the languid lead guitars, the spacey mood, the sweet melodies, but it's just not very memorable. They no longer seem to be navigating with artful assurance. The overly elongated tracks - I have complained about these on other albums in the last few years as artists try to pander to their prog audience - fail to captivate me as a unit, and, as if to underscore these attenuated extensions, seem to end in the middle and start again. On their debut, lest I sound like an intransigent codger, every track was no longer nor shorter than it needed to be. Even the castoffs from "Rings of Earthly Light", which recently appeared on a reissue credited to ERIS PLUVIA and spinoff ANCIENT VEIL, are superior to the best of what is offered here.

None of these criticisms are meant to imply that "Tales from Another Time" has no place in the present. Their prior accomplishments alone have earned them the right to be heard, but but they don't seem to be doing much to get beyond that audition. 2.5 stars.