Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
My Favorite Album of All Time, May 28, 2000
Every once in a while, an artist will produce something that is larger than themselves, better than anything he has done or will ever do. That is Secrets of the Beehive. I have a CD collection that goes well past the 700 mark, including everything Sylvian has done, and this one stands alone. I bought this record Halloween of 1987 and I have returned to it faithfully every year since then. It still sounds as fresh and perfect as the day I bought it. It's the quintissential melancholic soundtrack for Fall and Winter; an intensely private and moving record. Songs like Let the Happiness In, Orpheus, and (on the Japanesse re-release) Promise-The Cult of Euridyce, are as beutiful as music can get. The lyrics are both deeply intelligent and heartbreaking, "a grudge held from his childhood days/as if life had loved him less." And did I mention his voice? Sylvian is a crooner; he hasn't a fantastic range. But how he sings, his confiding, rich tenor, and how he turns a phrase, no one, NO ONE CAN TOUCH, Not Sting, Peter Gabriel, or any other of his contemporaries! The influences of Beehive are clear: Nick Drake, Scott Walker, even Samuel Barber. But Beehive is an acheivement that surpasses it's predecessors. It is an album for all time, a masterpiece.
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17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Obscure yet hauntingly beautiful, September 17, 2003
As a longtime King Crimson fan, having seen that he had collaborated with KC's heart and soul, Robert Fripp, always maintained his name in the front of my mind. But my first real exposure to Sylvian's work was when I accidentally ran into the song "The Devil's Own" from this album. I was instantly blown away. The tune had a melody that was like floating in the air, with an ethereal quality that made it hard to describe or replicate, yet intoxicatingly beautiful. Now, my music collection is closer to complete (or at least so it feels), since I got my copy of this album by the former frontman from the band Japan.Produced and engineered by longtime collaborator Steve Nye (Frank Zappa, Roxy Music, Bryan Ferry and Clannad, among many others) and with a continued extensive participation by Ryuichi Sakamoto, the album walks a thin line dividing Peter Hamill, Bryan Ferry, Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois and the soft side of Fripp: it hardly gets any better than this. Not only are the lyrics great, the music is hauntingly beautiful, and Sylvian gets to display his full range of instrument playing abilities, jumping from the keys to the strings between songs, besides singing in a way that makes you realize that the Duncan Sheik's of the world are just a copycat of this brilliant singer/songwriter. Considered by most as Sylvian's best album hands down, and having been transported by every tune on it, I can do nothing less of highly recommending it!
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Essential Melancholia, August 11, 1999
By A Customer
This may be my favorite record ever. I have listened to this album at least four times a week since it was released 12 years ago, and it has lost none of its appeal through repetition. An exquisite, almost unendurable sense of loss, isolation, and nostalgia pervades every song on this record. The shortness of the songs saves them from becoming self-indulgent and enables Sylvian to sustain a truly remarkable mood throughout. I listen to this record each September 1st to mark the end of summer. Despite the wintry quality of the songs, I have found this record to be most evocative when listened to in the late summer. The heat and haze of early September, the exhausted trees eager to shed their burden of leaves for another year, the delicate quality of daylight in a sun-dappled forest, the gentle sorrow that pervades the land at the end of the growing season: all of these moods and sensations are evoked by this extraordinarily powerful album. This type of music is not to everyone's taste, but I guarantee that this record possesses a dark beauty which will comfort you in those bleak hours of the early morning.
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album Secrets of the Beehive 
