Art Cinema
(Marvel of Beauty Records MOB CD019)
Art Cinema
(Marvel of Beauty Records MOB CD019)
This is the latest CD by Danish multi-instrumentalist, Robin Taylor. Featured on this CD is female vocalist, Jytte Lindberg. It is quite a line up of musicians on this CD including Michael Denner (Mercyful Fate), Jon Hemmersam (I reviewed a CD he did with Dom Minasi last year), Carsten Sinvald on sax, Flemming Muus on bass, Bjarne T. Holm on drums and Pierre Tassone on Violin. Jytte and Louise Nipper do all the vocals. The CD is quite an interesting mixture of what I would call artrock meets pop, creating what I like to call anti-pop! It features 7 tracks in 34 minutes. White Frozen is a very cool track, very moody but with excellent playing and cool keyboards, guitar and sax. World of Shadows is also very much mood music but a sort of real pop like piano and vocal delivery while the music keeps the mood a bit on the dark side. Creative stuff. It is actually the middle sections of all of these strange anti-pop tracks that get me excited as sometimes it is the sax that takes the lead and solos and other times Michael or Jon. Climb my Ladder is a short beautiful track but musically one of the least interesting. What am I doing Here features a great mid section with trading guitar solos by Michael and Jon and some sax thrown in as well. The piano is quite effective but also similar to the way it is used on some of the other tracks. Crimson Night fades in with some rumbles and drums and sax as the track takes shape. It is a very mellow piece of spacey music with subtle vocals and sounds hiding in the back before the main track picks up. This will remind you of one of the earlier tracks as it has the same sort of arrangement with the keyboards and music. Dreaming of Metamorphosis is another short dreamy track with no drums or guitar, only bass, piano, sax and vocals. Last Day of Summer ends the CD and this starts as a vocal piano piece but then the Glockenspiel comes in and later the dual guitars. Some of this stuff is really in the league of the melodic Pink Floyd stuff but the keyboards and piano are a bit more on the new age side and less the spacey classical side of rock. Great playing by all the players on this new adventure.
Check out the Robin Taylor web site at:http://www.progressor.net/robin-taylor
Reviewed by Scott Heller