ALBION

Wow, what a great performance of the group! I really enjoy their music with the influence of Marillion from the Fish years. Powerful solo slide guitar and very expressive keyboard in the background, a precisely, hot vocal with the hard bass and exactly drums is what do you can expected from this album. I still can listening Albion in trans, over and over again. In made of fact, after 10 years from date of released of this album it's still belong to my high favourites. In my opinion it's absolutely deserve a four stars rating. I will hardly recommended this album for any fan with a good taste of progressive music - you won't be disappointing.

A good piece of playing ,especially for Albion"s fans. Sometimes too sweety sounds. I"ve found second album the best.The girl"s voice is really touching and you can hear musicans' potenial through different spatial and emotional pieces of music.

rather godd if you are doing something in between, in other cases it catches you with the first tracks and then abandons you in a little bore. good vocals, celtic reminescences. For Magenta, Quidam, Renaissance and Satellite fans. 3 stars

Although listed on PA as their second album, Albion (1995) is really their first "real" one: Survival Games (1994) is more a collection of demos, hence the almost identical track list, albeit in different running order. I had this record for a long time and I must confess that I did not give it the proper time to listen more carefully at the time. Well, this is no Wabiac Cienie nor Broken Hopes, and the fact that I never liked the opener Scarecrow did not help matters. Which is really a pity, for the band showed that they were very good and unique from the very start. Ok, the first three tracks of the CD are not particularly convincing for anyone who is familiar with their latter output: nice stuff, good melodies for sure, but not quite outstanding. However, by then things go uphill and the second half reveals that this polish band was already working their songwriting skills, arrangements and performances to another level entirely.

Songs like Sarajevo, Jeszcze śmierć chowam w kieszeń and Golgotha show that Albion had their personal sound well developed, specially on the hands of guitarist Jerzy Antczak, who is clearly the star here, along with Anna Batko emotional vocal deliverance. The keyboards parts of Krzysztof Malec are not as greatly explored as he later would, but they are just as elegant and tasteful. the rhythm section is tight and the production is quite good for the time. It´s interesting to realise they would take a whole decade to come up with a follow up, but , as it happened, it would be worth the wait.

I am really happy that I gave this CD a second chance after all these years. It is far better than I initially thought and I´m glad to know that this band was special from the get go. And Jerzy Antczak is one of the most underrated guitarists of prog: his fluid, powerful and beautiful licks and solos are a joy to hear: personal and creative but clearly coming from the school of masters like Gilmour, Akkermann and Latimer. If you like that kind of sound you should check this record. A nice find!

Rating: something between 3,5 and four stars. Maybe not up to the next two follow ups but nearly as good.

On the strength of a precocious debut cassette or perhaps an unauthorized CD reissue which followed, a proper release was bankrolled by Sick Records. This eponymous "debut" mostly comprises reworkings from the demo, with a few previously unreleased pieces replacing some of the original tracks. The bad news is that the relatively weak "Scarecrow" and "You" survived the cut while the superior "Collapse" and "Shout" were victims. The good news is that the replacement numbers are uniformly excellent!

As I said before, "Scarecrow" plays like a mediocre BARCLAY JAMES HARVEST, with a decent sound but no development. "You" is most notable for representing the blueprint for the early success of OF MONSTERS AND MEN a decade and a half later, whether that Icelandic collective had ever heard this or not! In other words, it's clever pop with a few ambient tendencies, but a tad lightweight in this setting. The sound quality is cleaned up on the remakes, but not much else really changed: it's still lush, dreamy and melancholic with soaring guitar leads a la COLLAGE's "Moonshine" from a couple of years earlier, the heir apparent to the sound that COLLAGE couldn't grow before they imploded. Insert Anna Batko in lieu of Robert Amirian, clean em up and set em free! Well, except for "Golgotha", which is even spacier and suggests where DAVID SYLVIAN may have gone after his mid 1980s albums. It sports a rather fluid Spanish acoustic guitar style technique. I've yet to listen to more recent ALBION but this seems like this wouldn't be a bad template, unpredictable yet cohesive.

Among the newcomers, "Sarajevo" grafts a foreboding atmosphere to more uptempo sections reminiscent of STEVE HACKETT. "Shadow" is more mellow but just as haunting, anchored by plucked acoustic or low amp electric guitar and synths played like piercing winds. The band must have sensed the autonomic accompaniment and closed the album with an instrumental version. One Polish language mini epic is included, also gentle and acoustically driven, smoldering to an ensemble climax. The vocals do not dominate, and as such Albion avoids some of the most flagrant weaknesses of many practitioners of this style past and present. Spoiled again by Polish neo prog!