alextorres' profile

Excellent!, 22 Jun 2009

Aside from the annoyance of not having had a studio album from Procol Harum for six years, with only live releases to fill the space, this is actually a faultless, excellent album!

In August 2006 the band played a couple of open air shows with the Danish National Concert Orchestra and Choir in Denmark's Ledreborg Castle. The two shows were culled for a DVD and this CD: the DVD has 15 songs from the show, the CD only 10. Missing from the CD version are "Butterfly Boys", "The VIP Room", "Simple Sister", "An Old English Dream" and "Whaling Stories".

Much of their Procol Harum's music merges perfectly with symphony orchestras; a fact they have demonstrated amply before… Read more

Very good CD, even if not Hawkwind's best., 20 Jun 2009

"The Chronicle of the Black Sword" may not be in the bucket of "Hawkwind's Best Albums" but it is, nevertheless, a good Hawkwind album featuring all of their trademarks and it is a pleasure to see it released on CD once again: it gives people like me who missed the CD the first time around the opportunity to add it to our collections once again. Like other releases in this excellent Atomhenge series, the CD sound is crisp and clear and the CD booklet is excellent, with an article by Mark Powell featuring lots of photographs and art-work from the period.

The line-up for the album was Brock, Harvey Bainbridge (on synths and keys), Huw Lloyd-Langton (guitar), Alan Davey (bass),… Read more

Excellent melodic song-writing!, 17 Jun 2009

The Sutherland Brothers were always under-rated as a band despite being amongst the best song-writers in the country. Not even the "Arms of Mary" hit, that they had with Tim Renwick on board as the Sutherland Brothers & Quiver, was able to propel them to real stardom and they remained relatively unknown. My view is that in merging influences from the pop and folk worlds they actually made their music unappealing to many fans of those genres: additionally, their music was never heavy enough to appeal to many in the rock crowd.

That some of their recorded material survives to this day and is now beginning to surface on mp3 downloads such as this is a tribute to their insightful… Read more