BLACK GARDEN

Black Garden is the second album from K2. Their first album featured none other than the great Allan Holdsworth on guitars, but he is no longer in the band on this follow up album (just as he left the super group UK after their first album). The vocals are still highly Peter Gabriel-like, but the music is somewhat darker and heavier this time around. I don't mind this, but the songs are not particularly memorable and without Holdsworth's distinctive and classic guitar sound, K2 have slipped down a whole dimension on my scale of interest. In fact, I was slightly reluctant to even give the album a chance. But since I very much enjoyed K2's first album, I though why not. It would perhaps be too much to say that it is a disappointment. Rather, it is just as expected - a decent album, but one that falls far short of the high quality of the debut.

Possibly the music can be described as a darker, heavier and less theatrical version of Peter Gabriel-era Genesis. This does not sound bad at all on paper, but if we also remove the "star quality" and originality of that classic Prog group and keep in mind also the rather unmemorable material, the situation begins to looks worse. Another downside is that the album is rather long and whatever excitement they managed to build up on the first few tracks starts to wear off towards the middle and it almost becomes a challenge to stay with them all the way trough to the end.

I can warmly recommend K2's debut Book Of The Dead, but this follow up is primarily for fans

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