A CHANGE OF HEART

I simply bought this as a used vinyl for 50 cents in a second hand store only because I liked the album cover and it looked interesting. The album features quite an amazing lineup of instruments and musicians and prog archives lists it as jazz fusion, so that worked in it's favor after I got it home and looked up information on the album.

The album is full of Hindu inspired lyrics. Okay I can work with that. The vocalist had a very 70s soft rock timbre which quickly got on my nerves. This makes the entire album sound dated, but the fact that the vocals are way too clean just make the music sound cheesy. It's just too perfect. The vocals need some grit or something and the vocalist sounds nothing like Cat Stevens but more like David Gates or Bobby Goldsboro or Glen Campbell. The voice to me is too unbelievable and annoying because of it's plainness.

The instrumentals are actually very good and some of the instrumental breaks are very inspired. But unfortunately, they are not long enough and seem to be kept at bay way too much to make room for the vocals and lyrics. I guess that's the type of album they were trying to make. If things were reversed so that the instruments were allowed to take the spotlight more often, then it's possible this could have squeaked out a 4 star rating. I was hoping that the track entitled "Swetadwip" was going to at least allow more space for instrumental development, but the vocalist won't shut up long enough for that to happen.

So I can't give this a very good rating because the weaknesses are allowed way too much focus and not enough instrumental freedom definitely disqualifies this album as any kind of Jazz Fusion. This is more like Prog-Folk if anything, but it's hard for me to even consider it Prog-Folk because that would be an insult to good Prog-Folk bands like Blondel's earliest works. In actuality, it is more like Soft Rock with a few great yet frustratingly short instrumental breaks to keep things interesting, but not interesting enough. I'm certainly glad I didn't spend a lot on this and that I never came across this album back when it was released because I might have fallen for the album artwork, which has happened before, but usually with much better results. Don't bother with this one unless you like hindu-inspired soft rock, because that is all this is. 2 stars only. If it weren't for the few interesting instrumental breaks (and I mean very few) this would have only got 1 star.