Customer Reviews

Book of Invasions: Celtic Symphony

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I remember when the only top 40 hit that Horslips had came out and I remember going up the street from the rooming house where I lived and buying the album based on that single. I was not disappointed then and now, twenty five years after buying it the first time I happily purchased the CD and was immensely glad to find it. God bless the internet, that godsend to those who succumb to the temptations of a search engine and their credit line while under the influence of alcoholic nostalgia. Buy this album if you have ever wondered what Celtic music with balls sounded like.

This was the album of the 70's , this group took irish folk rock to the extremes and this was their best ever.I must have played the original version a thousand times and still you pick up on sounds that they or no one else has bettered.

It is a classic and johnny fean as guitar player is in excellent form.

horslips deserved to be huge and the tain was also brilliant , but they never made it in England , i went to see them in 1976 on the tour for this album in Uxbridge london and the audience was less than 30.

buy it if your into rock and irish music.

As far as I know, this is one of the early attempts to meld Celtic history with rock. And, as far as I can see, it is the best yet. If you don't like this, you won't enjoy the genre, such as it is. Groups like Clannad and Lorena McKennit modernize the old tunes, or create new ones in that mode, but Horslips did a modern retelling of a very old Irish story, the Book Of Invasions, concerning the invasion of Ireland by the Tua De Dannan. I have played this for nearly 2 decades, and it is still one of my reliable favorties. If you like the format, you can't go wrong with this one.

This was one of my favorite albums in High School but I never owned it so for years I searched for it. By the time I had gotten into it wasn't readily available on LP or Cassette and until recently on CD. Every time I went to a new city I would scour the used record shops and finally found it in Santa Cruz, CA.! I love the Celtic combination with the 70's rock. It sounds great on LP and now I'm psyched to find it on CD...

Finally! After years of waiting for the classic albums from this great Irish folk/prog/rock band to appear in non-"impossible to find" fashion, fans are rewarded with superb (with a capitol "s") reissues courtesy Edsel/Demon U.K. Book Of Invasions was a winning release (originally available on DJM Records, then distributed by GRT) filled with winning songs like "Trouble With A Capital T", "The Power And The Glory" and "King Of Morning, Queen Of Day". Excellently played flutes, rock-solid arrangements, hook-filled melodies. It's "Irish" alright, but not in the usual way. It reminded me of Jethro Tull only a little bit edgier. Edsel's remastering is excellent!

This is the hardest-rocking of all the Horslips albums, and some would argue it's their best, but due to a couple very weak songs, I rate it a notch below both "Drive the Cold Winter Away" and "The Man Who Built America". This is the album which spawned Horslips' only FM hit, "King of Morning, Queen of Day" in the mid 1970s. If you liked that song, you will love the rest of this album as it is more of the same. The highlights are really too numerous to mention, but I will mention a few. "Trouble With a Capital T" is what Jethro Tull might sound like if they were more hard-rocking. "Sword of Light" is driven by hard, driving bass lines and an incredible Celtic melody played on elecric guitar. "Drive the Cold Winter Away" is a modernized version of the old classic but never loses its traditional edge. "King of Morning, Queen of Day" is a killer. And "Fantasia" has to be the "dark horse" song of the album - it is an instrumental propelled by hard, driving bass lines and smoking, melodic electric guitar under a passionate overlay of whistle and electric violin. And, oh, the in-your-face bold production sparkles more on this album than any other Horslips album; the instruments just JUMP out of the speakers at you. Do youself a favor and get this NOW!

What a FINE band Horslips was, now sorely missed, did they prove with this outstanding album "Book of Invasions". After several studio-albums, a double "Live" and an fully acoustic album ("Drive the Cold Winter Away", from which the song with the same title appears here) it was time for something else so the band came up with a conceptalbum. Not entirely new of course because in the midseventies so many bands had put this to the test, with average succes, Horslips also included with "The Tain". So they thought of making a trilogy and together with "Aliens" and "The Man Who Build America" they did so and succeeded. But this one is the more legitime one of the 3-pack and the more authentic in sound and songwriting. This is a unique meltingpot of traditional Irish tunes, ballads, heavyrock, everthing played to the tilt. Amazing and beautiful. I can listen to this over and over. Very well crafted with plenty of original "Irish" folk-instruments, like flute, violin, concertina, acoustic guitar, not to mention the vocal parts. In addition bassguitar, organ and keyboards and heavy distorted guitars. Fingerlicking good, what a great sound and fine songs. Not many bands can compare to this. Listen how some songs have traditional intro's on original instruments, which are shortly picked up by screaming guitars. Strongly recommended.

This is the hardest-rocking of all the Horslips albums, and some would argue it's their best, but due to a couple very weak songs, I rate it a notch below both "Drive the Cold Winter Away" and "The Man Who Built America". This is the album which spawned Horslips' only FM hit, "King of Morning, Queen of Day" in the mid 1970s. If you liked that song, you will love the rest of this album as it is more of the same. The highlights are really too numerous to mention, but I will mention a few. "Trouble With a Capital T" is what Jethro Tull might sound like if they were more hard-rocking. "Sword of Light" is driven by hard, driving bass lines and an incredible Celtic melody played on elecric guitar. "Drive the Cold Winter Away" is a modernized version of the old classic but never loses its traditional edge. "King of Morning, Queen of Day" is a killer. And "Fantasia" has to be the "dark horse" song of the album - it is an instrumental propelled by hard, driving bass lines and smoking, melodic electric guitar under a passionate overlay of whistle and electric violin. And, oh, the in-your-face bold production sparkles more on this album than any other Horslips album; the instruments just JUMP out of the speakers at you. Do youself a favor and get this NOW!

I had not heard this music in years. I was listening to the local alternative music radio station and heard Sinead O'Connor singing her version of "My Lagan Love". It took me a minute to place it, then I realized where I had heard it before - Horslips!
This album was played all the time back in the late 70's - it was great then, it is great now - I am so glad I found it on CD.

Well, it's a toss-up between this and "Tain" as the two best Horslips LPs, and since I gave their debut "Happy to Meet" a full five, I'd give these other two albums even more. Neck-and-neck at first, but the Book of Invasions gets the horse's nod over the Tain. Book is a bit less dated in its arrangements. The pace is more sustained. The tightness of the band has been honed by years on stage. The prog leanings of their career's start seem--after Dance the Cold Winter's trad detour--seem to have been supplanted by a more medieval sounding, courtlier spark. Hearing this after practically memorizing the LP--it was the first of their LPs more widely distributed outside Ireland and Britain--this ain't rock and roll, this is rouse & roll. Coming out of the mid-70s overkill from so many "serious" musos, Horslips kept their sense of humor and cleverness, which I supposed enabled even their blandest albums (such as preceded this two back) somewhat worthwhile.

Unlike the other Horslips albums I have reviewed on Amazon, this album gains force from its accrued impact, rather than its individual tracks. Like "Táin," "Book" is meant to work as a unified single piece of music, as the subtitle defines it. Songs are chapters in a book, verses of a poem.

Instrumental and sung passages alternate in the three movements of the album from Geantrai--cheerier songs-- to Goltrai-- laments--to Suantrai-- songs of sleep or dreams. These unify as in storytelling various "branches" of the tale and classify them in ancient Irish categories of narrative craft and intent. It's a "Celtic symphony," therefore, in the ebbs and crests of the musical representation and the lyrical explanation of the energetic clashes and couplings the Book of Invasions (Leabhar Gabhala) relates-- the tribes who landed in pre-Christian Ireland successively to fight over its land and its wealth.

I always have a bit of a problem with lyrics from this band; they stick maddeningly in the memory--few bands wrote such catchy tunes that aren't jingles or dance-pop--but sometimes I think they fall flat in their rhyming or imagery, even as many other times they are sung as perfectly terse and cutting, fitting the aggression or the tenderness of the battles and couplings they narrate from one of the rhetorical skills preserved in these oldest surviving Irish epics, I reckon more than two thousand years old as they were passed down orally long before their manuscript forms. They do combine the grand metaphor with the colloquial taunt in a style that I guess might be surprisingly faithful to the shifts in register of the Old Irish text! Admittedly, compressing a long epic into forty minutes challenges the most talented, and Horslips proved here that they could not only repeat their success with the Táin, but bettered it by skills honed over their intervening three years of relentless gigging. No other band had the literary skills as well as the musical imagination to pull this off. "Book" should make you want to look up the originals--on or off-line now, handily. As a teen hearing this, I then turned to reading the original stories.

Rock and folk, tradition and innovation: few groups can combine these strands well. Horslips, in this and their other albums, even if they did not always reach such heights as here, were accomplished original artists. These guardians and transmitters of the storytelling treasure here are amplified; their determination to make the tales relevant as heard and as read remains impressive.

The clash of the tough tribes invading Ireland and the De Danaan defenders echoes through the shrieking guitars and whining winds and keys and ominous marching tattooes. It's a visceral album begging for great headphones and quality speakers. Vocals are winningly humble or dauntingly taunting, and the bold and tender tales are told with economy and intelligence.