ANYONE'S DAUGHTER

Some time ago I started a series of reviews here on Progshine with re-edition of Progressive Rock albums. The first one was of the debut album of the German band Anyone's Daughter so nothing more natural than the follow up is their second album Anyone's Daughter (1980).

Anyone's Daughter (1980) was originally released in 1980 by the labels Spiegelei/Intercord. This new edition was released in 2012 by the German labels Tempus Fugit/SPV in two different versions: CD and Limited Edition Picture Disc.

Anyone's Daughter showed in their first album, Adonis (1979), that Progressive Rock wasn't dead by the late 70's and that the genre had still strength to show new and good music. Anyone's Daughter (1980) shows how the band was able to maintain its own Prog sound but at the same time evolve and incorporate the new music of that time. The sound on this album is a bit more polished, there are more songs with vocals, the band began a transition that foresaw the arrival of Neo Prog just a couple of years later with bands like Marillion, Pallas and Twelfth Night.

Anyone's Daughter (1980) is packed with melody (like in the opening track 'Swedish Nights') but doesn't cast the Prog aside as we can hear in 'Thursday', 'Superman', 'Another Day Like Superman' (the best track on the album) and the closing song 'Between The Rooms'. Across the sound spectrum of Anyone's Daughter there are the pretty Symphonic ballads like 'Sundance Of The Haute Provence' (which, I would say, portrays very well the beautiful album cover) and 'Enlightment'.

'Moria' is an exception within the album, completely different from the rest, not only because of the Lord Of The Rings theme in the lyrics, but because of its modern kind of sound pointing to what would come next in their future albums.

As bonus content in this re-edition the CD has three live tracks that were recorded in 1980 during the tour of the album. The first, 'Superman' was recorded in Frankenbach, Germany and the other two ('Between The Rooms' and 'Sundance Of The Haute Provence') were recorded in Baden-Baden, also in Germany. All three live versions have high quality recording and work very well as extra for this remastered edition. The cherry on the cake is the booklet of the CD that apart from the lyrics has a great text (in German and English) by Stefan Oswald where he tells how the recordings of the album were done and includes many quotations from members of the band.

This new edition of Anyone's Daughter (1980) is perfect for you Prog fan who don't have this album yet in your collection or to the band's fans that don't have the CD version of the album!

Quality guaranteed!

(Originally posted on progshine.net)