 |
| Country of Origin: |
UK |
| Format: |
CD |
| Record Label: |
Cyclops |
| Catalogue #: |
CYCL105 |
| Year of Release: |
2001 |
| Time: |
64:05 |
|
Tracklist: Walking In Cascade (5:42),
By The Book (A Pop Song) (6:19), Tears In The Rain (5:07), Catholic
Education (5:48), Hushabye Mountain (3:03), Lead Me Where You Will (6:52),
Flight 19 (5:55), The Night And The Devil (5:52), Owning Up (5:41), The
Time Of Our Lives (6:11), Winter (7:35)
Guy Manning has produced two albums before this one, Tall Stories For
Small Children, and The Cure. I was very impressed with both albums, and
was looking forward to hear the new album, also since he now for the fist
time has had the ability to record with a complete band, including a guest
appearance of Angela Goldthorpe of Mostly Autumn.
Guy has been, and still occasionally is, affiliated with Parallel or 90
Degrees, and his last album The Cure could be considered pure prog rock,
where his debut album was a bit more in the (progressive)
singer-songwriter style. I hoped that his next album would expand more on
the progressive style he had shown to master on The Cure. Unfortunately,
he has turned back a bit more to the style of the first album, and where
the tracks on the first album were mostly quite intense, on this album he
turns a bit more to pop/rock tunes (for instance in By The Book, which
even has a subtitle called A Pop Song, or the very eighties Catholic
Education, which does have a great break in the middle section). In this
respect he seems to go a bit down the same road as Fish, as both this
track and Lead Me Where You Will remind me a lot of Fish's (not
necessarily best) solo work. There are some nice melodic parts in these
tracks, don't get me wrong, but for instance Lead Me.. has a very bare
second section where not much happens. Sure , it
's a composition style, and as Manning himself put it, it is not meant to
hit you in the face but to let it flow over you. That may be true, but it
took to long for me.
One of the highlights for me personally is Flight 19. This track, about
the disappearance of an airplane in the Bermuda Triangle, is also very
calm, but it contains a certain tension, the feeling of quiet desperation,
suppressed panic, that the pilot must have felt. One thing has to be said:
the album needs a LOT of listenings before you start to appreciate it
fully, and so maybe I didn't even hear it enough yet (about ten times).
Not that the compositions are overly complex, no, due to the simplicity of
many tracks you do not get all the subtleties at once. In that respect he
is a bit like Dylan, for instance in Owning Up. Winter may be closest to
prog with its haunting keyboard/vocal intro and powerful pounding middle
section.
In summary, the album is subtle through and through so if you think of his
more "massive" The Cure, you will find yourself in for a surprise. It
contains many styles: pop, rock, prog, ballads, lullabies, blues, all in
their more moderate form. A note on production and mixing: I personally
think it is rather flat, but that again is a personal opinion. The general
impression of the album is positive, but for me personally it did not
reach the level of Tall Stories or The Cure. Large parts of the album
remind me of the way Fish approaches music.
Conclusion: 7 out of 10.
Remco Schoenmakers
Back