VOYAGE OF THE ACOLYTE

One thing about a Steve Hackett album as opposed to a Genesis album, there's a lot more instrumental music. The guy is pretty intelligent and isn't afraid to try something different. He features the oboe here, which Genesis didn't do. But this features the same synthesiser backdrop that is on the Genesis albums of that time.

The first two songs are vintage Genesis, the first being typical of Genesis and the second, 'Hands of the Priestess' features a much more acoustic/baroque sound, with plenty of flute. The problems come after this. 'Tower struck down' is victim of being too eccentric. It starts off quite good, being a dark semi-rocker with eerie synths. But without Tony Banks and others being around to do scrutinous quality control checks, too much eccentricity creeps in. With Hackett on his own, there's no one around to say "Now take out that DUMB coughing sample, Steve". The best of the rest is 'Star of Sirius' which is folk/prog but has a breezy chorus that gets repeated a bit near the end. It's nice and it features Phil Collins on vocals, which helps. The rest of the songs are nice but don't really have any hooks or anything. The last song is an 11 minute epic. It starts off with this girl singing beautifully, but I can't understand her at all, then there's a bit of acoustic music and big mellotron sound and this is repeated twice. That takes the song to four and a half mintues, before the songs gets louder and there's a bit of meandering music before there's a masterful guitar solo, probably not strong enough to justify being six minutes long, but good anyway.

I'm Giving Steve 3.5, top marks for varying the songs, giving instruments like the oboe and the flute prominence in a guitar/keyboard world, daring to be different and making a couple of 'Genesis' classics, as well as making a clean production. But his music lacks hooks, and he suffers from not having a permanent singer for his albums.