Customer Reviews

Farewell to the Shade

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If you are looking for a CD that can cause a person to forget the boundaries dividing imagery and reality, then Farewell to the Shade should be what you will find. The vivid lyrics and haunting chords produce a state of enlightened disillusionment for the listener. From the intense "Ill Omen" to the aerial "The Harp," Farewell to the Shade consumes all of your emotions and then regurgitates them back out, except this time you would have forgotten how you were originally feeling. It's a lovely ride.

From the opening track,Prince Rupert,one is immediately pulled into a lush and intrigueing journey from medieval to victorian England in the first half of the album alone.The characteristic image poems of AATT draw one pleasantly into each of the twelve tracks on the album.Emotions run from fear to anger to desperate sadness and hope.AATT at the top of their game!

To say this is still the finest AATT album (their fourth) is to damn the others with faint praise; nevertheless as a discrete work it encapsulates everything great from this most literate of bands without being seriously damaged by its weaknesses. Stark raving beauty abounds here, from the plushly (if synthetically) orchestrated "Belief In The Rose" to the astounding maelstrom and triple-entendre of "The Street Organ" to the descriptively instrumental (always AATT's strongest point) "The Harp." The only possible drawback is the sometimes overbearingly melodramatic voicing of Simon Huw Jones, but given AATT's appropriate musical contexts and the beautiful lyrics (which he pens) it's hard to complain too loudly (or imagine a replacement). Given the title and its marginally more accessible sound, it would seem that this was intended as AATT's breakthrough release. It was not. Too bad for them, but it proves that even at their most compromising AATT would remain forever unique.