THE GREAT LEAP

Not my favourite Phideaux album, but it's really grown more interesting with repeated listens. Alice Cooper meets The Wall era Pink Floyd...sort of. There isn't really enough use of light and shade, so dramatically it falls a bit flat. It also needs a bit more variety instrumentation wise, and Phideaux would expand the sound considerably with his next work, Doomsday Afternoon. The final track titled appropriately, "Last" , does redeem some of the sameness that the previous pieces suffer from, and gives a nice resolution to the work. In light of sequels to come, The Great Leap comes across as somewhat of prototype for the forms he would use more successfully later on. In all, not a bad piece of Floydian style rock opera, and I have grown to quite like it. But put on the next CD in the series, Doomsday Afternoon, and it's obvious he'd learnt a lot from what was not quite right with The Great Leap.