Moon Madness [Remastered] - Camel

Advantages: No lyrics to get stuck in your head
Disadvantages: One for the serious listener.

...Music inspired by The Snow Goose (to be precise, more later) - is in my opinion the Magnum Opus of Camel. Whilst lacking lyrics, and the musical variety of albums such as MoonMadness and Mirage, this epic showcases the band's talent and skill, and is also a perfect lazy Sunday track to listen to. As concept albums go, it has to be one of the more focused attempts ever performed. Released in 1975, and following the acclaim of Mirage's White Rider Suite (based on the fall and subsequent rise of Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings), and their eponymous Debut, Camel wanted to purse more conceptual suites - in particular novel themes. This album is based on the short story The Snow Goose, by Paul Gallico. The album title was changed to include the 'Music inspired by...' tag due to legal protest by Gallico, a vehement anti-smoker, who mistook... Read review

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Advantages: A musical watershed; Your CD player will biodegrade before these tracks become yesterday's noise...
Disadvantages: Hazardous to listen to if you're prone to contemplating suicide...

.../hope-affirming qualities; the stubborn defiance, the resolute independence, the cyclical regularity and consistency of degree of travel, all merely a mockery of life's transient nature, an illusion calculated to raise our hopes just high enough to allow us a temporarily unobstructed view of the tragic and inescapably hopeless nature of the human condition. E. A Legacy Of Lunacy Waters ingeniously draws on another, less apparent, yet more insidious characteristic associated with the literary symbol of the moon, i.e., insanity or "lune-acy", with which to accommodate the other theme which pervades the album's music and lyrics: the madness which either A), one requires to accommodate the folly of false hope, strength and defiance of death which is temporarily simulated by the apparent consistency of life's hypnotically and rhythmically cyclical day... Read review

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Advantages: Lots of tracks...lots of memories
Disadvantages: Not fully comprehensive.

...If you were not around at the height of Madness' career then you will probably still appreciate this album. It is full of the greatest hits, and so will be the ones that you remember, plus a few more that you will soon learn to love. If you were there at the time though, then you might not find this album to be the most comprehensive. For me though, it has the lot: It must be Love, House of Fun, Our House, Wings of a Dove, Uncle Sam, Grey Day, Cardiac Arrest. I'll stop. I was just going to list my favourites, but that would have been almost the whole album. Money wise, it is very good value, as it contains 24 tracks, all of which have been digitally remastered, so it is better than the last hits album. It also includes their two new hits, Lovestruck, and Jonny the Horse, both of which were great, just proving that Madness... Read review

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