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Renaissance - Turn of the Cards CD (album) cover

TURN OF THE CARDS

Renaissance

 

Symphonic Prog

4.15 | 745 ratings

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Warthur
Prog Reviewer
5 stars After a couple of strong albums, with Turn of the Cards Renaissance might aft first seem to be treading water. Sure, the formula is very much like the one used on Ashes Are Burning - similar number of tracks, similar folk-classical-prog blend, there's even a Jim McCarty contribution in the form of Things I Don't Understand, co-penned with Dunford (though this would be the last McCarty-penned track the band would record), Running Hard even lifts a theme from Mr. Pine from the Illusion album, a rare acknowledgement by the band of their pre-Prologue history. (At this point they were habitually ignoring the first two Renaissance entirely when putting together concert setlists.) Mother Russia, meanwhile, makes a stab at closing the album with a rousing crescendo along the lines of Ashes are Burning's title track.

I'd previously been unimpressed with the album, getting the sense that Renaissance were plagiarising themselves a little - though with Ashes Are Burning being so good, one could have forgiven them for rehashing it. At the same time, thanks in part to a sensitive remastering job by Esoteric which is a marked improvement over many previous CD reissues of the album, I've reassessed.

The subtle thing going on here, which I hadn't previously appreciated, is that this is the album where the band really solidify their grasp of the dramatic. Not theatrical - Annie Haslam isn't going full Kate Bush or Peter Gabriel acting out characters here, she's more of a narrator than an actor - but there's still this powerful sense of a story being told here, like the best parts of orchestral Hollywood scores combined with narrative folk music and served up in a magnificent prog rock stew.

I've come to think that Renaissance are a crucial part of the prog rock picture of the mid-1970s - one of those bands who defines a sound all of their own and for whom no easy substitute can be found - and it's on this album and its predecessor their sound came into focus. The Esoteric rerelease is a little dear, but also comes with a full live show from New York's Academy of Music in 1974 (previously released separately), and it sounds fantastic.

Warthur | 5/5 |

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