DAYS OF FUTURE PASSED

The Moody Blues

Crossover Prog

4.20 | 956 ratings

From Progarchives.com, the ultimate progressive rock music website

Except for the orchestra this is a typical Moody Blues album. They write a couple of really great songs (in the case of Nights In White Satin, Justin Hayward has written his masterpiece). They add filler to get to around 40 minutes of music, come up with a futuristic album title then get the Art department at Decca to design an imaginative album sleeve.

The problem is it's difficult to tell apart the orchestra from the rock instrumentation. You might as well be listening to Benjamin Britten's Young Person's Guide To The Orchestra or Prokofiev's Peter And The Wolf. A few years later Procol Harum made Live: In Concert With The Edmonton Symphony Orchestra. The latter is a perfect integration of rock with orchestra. That one is a masterpiece. This one isn't. Nights In White Satin is one of the great songs of the rock era. It works with orchestra or without orchestra. It doesn't matter.

Days Of Future Passed, in my view, would have worked better with less orchestra and more electronic keyboard. Mike Pinder was one of the pioneers of Mellotron technology. He has imaginative ideas which never seem to be developed on. If only the other members of the band weren't so intent in writing pop singles and instead expanded on some of Pinder's use of Mellotron to write longer more atmospheric songs. Otherwise what you get from a Moody Blues album is great album sleeve art which draws you to the music, but the disappointment of listening to songs that have only a peripheral connection to the album title and album sleeve artwork.

iluvmarillion | 3/5 | 2020-1-23

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