Review Summary: Sublime riffing
If Captain Beyond continued at the same levels as they did in their debut album, now we would be talking about a legendary band. Besides, the band's composition had the stature of a super-group: Rod Evans (ex-Deep Purple) on vocals, Larry ''Rhino'' Reinhardt and Lee Dorman (ex-Iron Butterfly) on guitars and bass respectively, while Bobby Caldwell (ex-Johnny Winter) was behind the drum set. Of course many bands existed (and continue to exist) that start their career with the greatest of expectations and eventually they disappointed. That was surely the case for Captain Beyond, however, before they let us down they managed to leave behind a remarkable album. It is extremely difficult for me to determine the exact genre of this album since it has a variety of characteristics ranging from psychedelic/blues/hard/acid and progressive rock and this can be ascertained by a careful hearing.
A remarkable characteristic of this album is that although it is not a concept one, the songs have a remarkable coherence between them. I don't want to comment on the individual songs because the specific work has to be heard in its completeness in order to be evaluated correctly. If not, the meaning and a lot of the virtues that the songs possess would be lost. ''Dancing Madly Backwards'', ''Armworth'' and ''Myopic Void'' which are the first three songs, segue each other and are all based on the same catchy riff which rotates in between the three. In this way, a tremendous smoothness is created and the listener thinks that it is one song while in reality are three individual ones. The same scene is met in another two instances between ''Thousand Days of Yesterdays''/''Frozen Over''/''Time Since Come and Gone'' and in ''I Can't Feel Nothing''/As the Moon Speaks''/''Astral Lady''/''As the Moon Speaks (Return)''/''I Can't Feel Nothing (Part 2)'', which basically are all the remaining songs.
I found the way that the band treated the songs extremely clever. They had managed to open 'themes' where they were setting up the scene, creating the atmosphere for the next song to enter, finish that song and then came back to finish what was left undone of the previous one. Overall, it's a very groovy album with skillful drums and at the same time beautiful guitar melodies. I believe that in order to be appreciated it has to be listened some times first. It may not impress from the first moment but I think that as long as you keep listening it becomes better and better.
