Bronze

From 1973 until this very year (2019 at time of writing) one-time Uriah Heep man Ken Hensley has treated us to a huge amount of music outside of the band that he still can’t quite shake of his long standing link with. The first of these solo sojourns, Proud Words On A Dusty Shelf, arrived in 1973, when Hensley was still part of The ‘eep and very much ‘appy to be so. Together with 1975’s Eager To Please and 1980’s Free Spirit these three albums have been brought together under the banner The Bronze Years 1973-1980 by Cherry Red/HNE Records with a newly recorded DVD, which finds roughly an hours’ worth of new chat with man himself regarding the three albums re-released here and the era in which they were recorded…

This double-disc is a very solid collection of Sally Oldfield's recordings for the CBS subsidiary Bronze (don't laugh, Uriah Heep was on there too). Before her brief resurgence in the '90s, Oldfield's recordings were new age before there was such a term. She brought not only a songwriter's sense of elegance to tape, but also an instrumentalist's sense of silence and dynamic. Brother Mike Oldfield helped out on "Waterbearer," perhaps he best-known offering here, as well as on some of the subsequent tracks on later records. Oldfied was the real precursor to people like Enya and Loreena McKennitt, marrying a classicist's sense of arrangement and dynamic to a mystic's heart and a Celtic woman's abiding folk history, myth, and legend. These two discs are impeccably remastered and offer a wonderful introduction to a talent who, at least on this side of the pond, never got her proper due.