WATER COLORS

This water is cold instead of cool and I don't see many colors. After the two albums released in the 80s Peter Bardens goes more deeply into the newage world with an album well produced, full of clean keyboards but very far from the Camel's days.

I don't dislike the newage, and effectively we can consider this album as borderline with what we call progressive electronic, but it lacks the hypnotic qualities of Tangerine Dream or the warm mediterranean flavor of Vangelis. Each track is good enough but I see no feelings inside it. Apart the opener, the title track and few moments here and there it leaves me completely cold.

This is often the limit of this kind of relaxing newage music: if there's not a big composing effort it results repetitive and boring.

Water Colors is a good album to be listened on a sofa in a night club or as soundtrack to a sequence of images (as it was effectively intended for), but in my opinion it doesn't match the requirements to be considered a progressive album.

I don't disagree with the 3 stars rating that this album currently has. It's not absolutely bad and is absolutely non-essential, however it's not much better than its two predecessors that I have rated as collector items, so I'm sorry for decreasing the current 3.00 rating of this album of an artist that I love, but to be honest this is good only for fans and newagers. I consider it as a follow-up to Seen One Earth and Speed of Light also because some ideas from those two albums seem to have been reused here.