THE SPELL

I bought the original vinyl version of this album. It came on two 12" 45rpm discs, in an effort to improve the recorded quality and dynamic range from the disc. In technical terms, it largely works, and the dynamic range on this album is astonishing for vinyl, but the problem is that this makes it a difficult album to listen to in some respects: If you advance the volume control enough to clearly hear and appreciate the quieter passages, the crecendos and forte passages will rattle your windows, and the enhanced frequency response that the 45 rpm reproduction allows will certainly shake your teacups!

Now to the music: "The Spell" is an Enid examination of the Four Seasons. "Winter" successfully makes you feel cold, and introduces some rather lovely themes that appear in differing forms in subsequent season pieces. "Spring" continues from "Winter" and introduces more themes. "Summer" introduces rather bizarre vocals (entirely in keeping with the music, of course), and includes a wonderful guitar solo that Pink Floyd would be proud of. "Autumn" is predominently keyboards, and is suitably lush,,,,, A well-crafted suite of lovely music. My late Father would sometimes listen to this suite, but only after I'd transferred it to CD and applied some compression to reduce the dynamic range to make it more suitable for comfortable domestic listening!

This album is one really for the more diehard fans. It lacks the immediacy of some of their other albums, but is still one I return to. I'll give it a 3.5 - it's not perfect, but it's much better than most of the stuff that was around at the time!