GARDEN SHED

Take the polished prog delivery of Genesis, from around A Trick of the Tail, add generous amounts of Yes (just listen to the start of Three Piece Suite and tell me that's not a reference to A Venture!), and give the whimsical vocals a tense, nervous delivery that sometimes hints at something a little darker than the fairytale stories of early Genesis and you've got England, and Garden Shed. Had it been released five years earlier or later it would have been much more successful - in the former case as a peer to the bands it is influenced by, and in the latter as part of the neo-prog movement; heck, if it were released today it'd be regarded as a fairly decent retro-prog effort.

That said, the climax of the album - Poisoned Youth - hints that there was more to the band than just paying tribute to the old masters of the prog scene; this concluding epic, based on The Picture of Dorian Gray, finally manages to fuse the Genesis and Yes influences into a coherent whole (on other songs it's more as though there's a Yes bit, followed by a Genesis bit, followed by a Yes bit, and so on), and takes the sound developed into interesting musical territory. Had England survived to make a second album, and had they managed to pursue the new ground they'd broken on Poisoned Youth, they might have had more success. As it is, this is a great album which is interesting in terms of bridging the golden age of prog in the UK and the Marillion-led new wave, but isn't of such consistently high quality that it quite merits a fifth star.