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Pendragon - Not of This World CD (album) cover

NOT OF THIS WORLD

Pendragon

 

Neo-Prog

3.92 | 586 ratings

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Easy Livin
Special Collaborator
Honorary Collaborator / Retired Admin
4 stars Well padded

A very complete album from Pendragon, which flows seamlessly from beginning to end. The tracks are generally pretty similar, being lengthy pieces of symphonic prog. The one irritation I had with the album was I kept hearing sections which sounded very like other people's work. There are extracts which sound like Steve Howe, Enigma, etc., and one which is almost identical to a section of Barclay James Harvest's "May day" from "Octoberon". I'm not suggesting there's any sort of plagiarism going on, but I found the presence of so many similarities distracting.

None of the tracks are Pendragon classics as such, there's no "Good as gold" or "The shadow", but they are all of a high standard, and very melodic. The pace is raised slightly on "All over now", and "Give it to me", but "If I were the wind" and "A man of nomadic traits" are more indicative of the overall feel of the album. Throughout there is a symphonic sound, Clive Nolan layering keyboard after keyboard as the foundations.

While some of the tracks are nominally broken into sections, the shortest track is over 9 minutes, giving some idea of the space available to develop the themes. That space is not always exploited to the full, and the album would perhaps have been better if they had introduced more variety within each piece. The notion that they may have been thin on ideas is supported by the inclusion of two "Bonus tracks". These originally appeared on the extra disc which accompanied some copies of "The Masquerade Overture". Both are acoustic versions of tracks from that album, "King of the castle" being extracted from "The shadow".

The albums is probably best heard as a complete piece, despite the fact that the tracks do stand up OK on their own. While it is a quality offering, it would have been better if the tracks had been developed more, instead of simply being made longer.

Easy Livin | 4/5 |

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