The impressive talents of Daniel Crommie are brought together to perform another of his solo efforts on this 2003 release which finds a few of his stable mates helping out with some intermittent playing from Leslie Gray, Bruce Gelman, Paul Evans and Janie Mitchell.
Although Daniel is probably best known for his band efforts with Saturnalia Quartet (& Trio) and Group Du Jour, his solo albums now total 5 since his first offering in 1988.
Being mainly composed with keyboards, I was hoping for a novel experience as I find this type of instrumentation often delivers an entirely different panoply of sounds and textures, commensurate with the composers ability and imagination to be as creative as possible. For the first 2 tracks, Daniel's talents certainly come to the fore, however, I found things went down hill pretty quickly after that and regrettably, never emerged above a level of competence and totality that would have other composers running to the far reaches of Manchuria in search of something more gritty and worth hearing.
Each track on this CD is comparatively short by progressive music standards but as an attempt at melding some progressive themes with the requisite ambient overtones, I found a lot of the music to be little more than filler. Some of the tracks are ridiculously short and represent a simple repetitive concept that simply fails to deliver on most fronts. The track, "Ripples" suffers from way too much droning with no interlude to break things up and is quite frankly boring while the next track, "Truth" at only 41 seconds has absolutely no time in which to convey any musical message at all. This whole album, to me at least, suggests Daniel had a few nice ideas mysteriously pop into his head only to find they had left again very quickly before being allowed sufficient time to develop them properly. While listening attentively under headphones certainly helps to absorb the concepts offered here, I am left feeling a little empty at the end of my sojourn. For an album to offer only 3 reasonable, albeit, short tracks out of a total of 16, is the domain of our two-chord wonder bands that proliferates the radio charts despite being paid ridiculously large sums of money for what is tantamount to nothing more than dross.
When it is all said and done, Daniel's material is unfortunately a droning and rambling affair that just doesn't get out off 1st gear. Sure, I can see that this is aimed at the mainly ambient end of the market but I'm afraid this one has missed the target by a country mile.
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