The second album from this British band/project.
Mandalaband is the now famous Egyptologist Davy Rohl's project. He has hired in numerous other musicians here. That include 10cc, Barclay James Harvest and Maddy Prior and Justing Hayward (two of my alltime favourite vocalists) from Steeleye Span and The Moody Blues.
The lineup is all kind of imaginable instruments.
At that time and before he became a world renowned academic, Davy Rohl was the studio-engineer and inhouse producer in Strawberry Studios. So he worked with a lot of musicians and could pick and choose those for this project.
I reviewed their self-titled 1975 album for ProgArchives back in June 2009 and rated it very highly. I am aiming to review their final two albums within the next weeks/you will find the reviews of their two final albums somewhere else in this blog.
As a project about a Tolkien world, this album is a very mixed bag. It starts with the title track which is a very good track. The opening minute of that track has been used in numerous TV and films as a soundtrack.
The music is broadly speaking cinematic prog with some proper songs and some more cinematic themes. It is a mixed bag of those genres. Maddy Prior and Justin Hayward sings like the great vocalists they are.
Not everything here is good. But on balance, this is a good album. Barely a good album, but still a good album. It is a typical overblown 1970s and 1980s album though. But this forty minutes long album still works out fine and gives me forty reasonably good minutes. Check it out.
3 points
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