AFFINITY

The jazz influences of this charming album seem to come from bluesy soul music, so the rhythms are not chaotic, and the music is accessible and easy to listen to. The brass dominated orchestrations accompanied with the instrumentation of the early 70's create a pleasant sound texture, which resembles Uriah Heep's jazzy maneuvers on "Salisbury" and the music of Mogul Thrash. The beautiful voice of Linda Hoyle also shares the voice range of the male hard-rock singers of the 1970's certainly. What I found sad about this record was the fact that all of the tracks except "Three Sisters" and "All Along The Watchtower" ended up to a fadeout (I have been listening to a CD version with two bonus tracks). This felt annoying, especially on the fourth song, where Linda is just starting to get it seriously from Mr. Joy, and then her ecstatic voices are muffled by the engineer with a fade-out fetish. If you are not allergic to this kind of treatments, then the listening experience should be more rewarding. I'm certainly going to check out Linda's Solo album and the other posthumous instrumental recordings of this band, as the music sounds very good despite the mixing solutions.