GERARD

Well you could also erase another half star, as this debut album didn't pay a tribute to the bombastic style by ELP at all, or any similar Prog band of the seventies at least (whose profusion of epic keyboards was the main target), but with its peek of harmonic solutions, being not so remarkable, it was alone a controversial episode, that is such a new-prog work with hints of hard rock music. In fact their stuff was often much inferior for example than that one produced by another Japanese band called "Teru's Symphonia" (regarding of their taste within the development of the suites) and something was missed at the beginning.Nevertheless here you find the analogical synthesizers and every kind of orchestration, which has been the typical "trademark" by K. Emerson, E.Jobson or Rick Wakeman for example, even though inside a certain "Marillionian" mood, which is disturbing nowadays... Toshio Egawa- the founder of the band- was not reduced to a derivative role only and the contribution of the Japanese keyboardist was interesting in a few circumstances,especially where he didn't want to give us any demonstration;but- apart from these considerations- I think that such work was quite personal yet, despite of their several stereotypes they liked to use,above all considering the epic and hard prog scene of the early eighties.Moreover their following transformation into a different ensemble, performing an hard rock genre definitively, made their stuff quite forgettable some years later!!!This was at the end a normal new-prog stuff, symphonic oriented and pretty much derivative, characterized by interesting music features-sometimes remarkable- and anything else ...make your own choice!!