Review on 🎵 Next Album by Jessica Lewis

According to the accompanying lyrics, the band named themselves after American composer Terry Riley's 1969 minimalist masterpiece "A Rainbow in Curved Air", although the music on this 1971 release is anything but minimalist is. This is a full Prog album and the eight tracks on the second album show the use of odd time signatures, virtuoso playing from all the musicians (in fact keyboardists Francis Monkman and Darryl Way studied at the Royal Academy of Music for a time), some complicated ensemble playing and great singing viola Sonya Christina. Keyboarder Francis Monkman made extensive use of the VCS-3 synthesizer on this recording, along with the Hammond organ, mellotron and piano. Interestingly, he was also a decent electric guitarist, using both distorted and "clean" tones. Fiddler Darryl Way is also great and co-wrote the first five tracks with Sonya Christina while Francis Monkman wrote three tracks including the energetic Everydance, the slightly goofy Bright Summers Day '68 and the superb 12'53" suite Piece of Mind It is worth noting that in "Part of the Mind" Sonia Christina recites an excerpt from TS Eliot's epic The Wasteland.In fact, "intellectual" references to the literature were not uncommon at the time, for example Grace Slick wrote of Jefferson Airplane a work influenced by James Radical Ulysses Joyce Percussionist/drummer Florian Pilkington-Mixa is superb, displaying a stylistic range that ranges from the virtuoso and thunderous raves of Everydance to the hypnotic conga lines of the tranquil Puppets track The bass slot was occupied on the second album by the excellent Jan Eyre, although the position of the bass kept changing as more ere bassists have come and gone over the course of several years. Despite the changes, they managed to create a distinctive sound over the course of three wonderful and highly recommended albums, including Air Conditioning (1970), 2nd Album (1971) and Phantasmagoria (1972).