THE SENTINEL

I am very much afraid I must go against popular opinion on this album; I bought this on the strength of having seen them at the Reading Festival in 1983, and whilst I initially enjoyed it hugely, on further listenings, and most recently having dug out the vinyl album after reading the reviews on the site, I have to say I find the album a triumph of ideas over talent. This is a scathing comment, I know, but I find that apart from tracks such as Arrive Alive (a much earlier song of the band's, re-recorded for the album session) and Shock Treatment, they display a raft of good ideas without the ability to commit them to tape. They were not helped in this task by the choice of Eddie Offord as producer (picked specifically due to his earlier work with Yes - a band Pallas worshiped from afar) - the album was recorded at Offords studio, but the results were distinctly muddy.

Don't get me wrong, I wanted to like this album, but the more I listen to it, the less I hear - Brown & Mathewson on Keyboards/Guitar do their best, and have a lot of talent between them, but the writing is very average, shown especially on the Atlantis epic and Ark Of Infinity - they knew what they wanted to do, but in my humble opinion, were unable at the time to pull it off