Return II Space

The companion piece to The Flying Teapot, Angel's Egg is not your usual progressive rock album. Very quirky, with many, mostly brief compositions, the album is a tad less spacy than Teapot, with just a few psychedelic-inspired lyrics, and it's very technically adept. Angel's Egg opens with a true space rock cut (one of the few on the album), filled with the usual Gilli Smyth space whispering and Daevid Allen voicings, then leads into the cleverly titled "Sold to the Highest Buddha," with Steve Hillage and Didier Malherbe prominent figures. The instrumental "Castle in the Clouds" finds Hillage coming into his own, with a sound identical to his solo work. "Givin' My Love to You" sounds like a bar song, with no music and a cluster of seemingly drunken fellas trying to sing…

Deepest View (Archive Volume 3) (2011). Following closely in the footsteps of their first two archival releases, Space Debris return with a third volume of live recordings and bits and pieces. Starting off in an unusually subdued mood, with moody acoustic piano, the 10-minute opening cut Mary-Joe-Anna nonetheless gets going eventually into another heavy jam from the band. The shorter Reprise of the Sun features some nice electric piano. Off course, throughout is the sterling organ work that is something of a signature sound for Space Debris, provided on some tracks by current keyboardist Winnie Rimbach-Sator and on others by former keyboardist Tom Kunkel. But let’s not forget the tight rhythm section of Peter Brettel (bass) and Christian Jäger (drums) and the endlessly creative guitar playing of Tommy Gorny…

Essentially French keyboardist Cyrille Verdeaux and an ever-changing list of collaborators, among them Christian Boule and Gilbert Artman, Clearlight was among the most well-known French symphonic progressive rock bands of the 1970s. Their massive, occasionally psychedelic sound showed a different side to Verdeaux than his later, more new age records. One of the first bands signed to the fledgling Virgin Records in the early 1970s, Clearlight has been compared to such progressive bands as Yes and Genesis as well as more experimental groups like Gong. The first Clearlight album, 1973's Symphony, presents the band at the height of their grandeur, pursuing everything from modern experimentalism to more classically styled pieces. For the project, Verdeaux took on several members of Gong as collaborators. It was later re-recorded with a great deal of new material in 1990 and released as Symphony II.