This is an album (MOSTLY AUTUMN'S seventh) of competent 70s emulation music. Those who love it will be outraged at it me calling it that. For them the York seven piece band are a haven of grand emotion in a needlessly sterile and restless world. As long as MOSTLY AUTUMN hold the centre ground, rhythmic impulses will be steady and thumping, melodic drives will yearn for sustained high notes and soaring female anguish will live at the cusp of artistic triumph.
As long as this album plays, guitar solos will spin off with hope towards a new Gilmore sunrise and drama will sweep the soundstage like a vampire's cloak at the opera. It's as if time and invention stopped somewhere in the planning stages of Jim Steinman's journey towards Bat Out of Hell. The band are fired by the spirit of Genesis, Fairport Convention and pre-Rumours Fleetwood Mac, drawn on by devotion to Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon". But something is missing.
My own personal memories of those 70s bands, shot to pieces by 30 years of creative development in popular music, are fond enough, but they are frail and fading. I can say for certain that they are not drawn towards this almost similar music. It lacks the freshness, the audacity, the sheer reckless naivety of those years. Floyd never tried to emulate anyone. Genesis, Fairport Convention, Deep Purple – whoever they were in those days they were obsessed with newness, with change, with the thrill of innovation and a refusal to follow patterns. There were happy to take the risk of sounding absurd, but they usually managed to astonish and delight with sounds we had not heard before.
|
My working assumption is that there are plenty of people who still hear King Crimson's "In The Court of the Crimson King" as the high water mark of British rock, and who never feel really comfortable with anything that challenges that grandiose set of idioms. These might be people who still play the mantra of "Shine on you Crazy Diamonds" as a weekly reminder of their true belief and calling. They are people who are happy to arrive, but who have lost their taste for the journey into new territory.
The point is not that those epic achievements of British progressive rock were or are worthless. It was the newness and the creative spark that made them so exciting. Repeat visits to the same sources by less inspired., less creative devotees simply don’t have the same impact. It sounds similar, but it feels so different. At some point you have to let it go and move on. All true music takes the spirit and moves it on. MOSTLY AUTUMN turn it repetitively, almost obsessively, in their fluent hands, dulling its edge and its glitter as they do so. The fire of faith has taken on the hollow sound of rosary beads being counted.
|
