Wednesday, 2 January 2019

Curved Air - Air Conditioning


Rating: 4/5

Review:
Still a good album

Air Conditioning has aged rather well. It came out when I was in the sixth-form and was staple listening then. Sonja Kristina created considerable excitement among us teenage boys for reasons which were not exclusively musical, and after several decades I was interested to see whether the music itself justified my good memories. On the whole it does.

The star of this album for me (nowadays, anyway) is Darryl Way. His musical excellence and the unusual sound of a violin on a rock album still make Air Conditioning stand out from the slew of very average stuff in the early 70s. Tracks like Vivaldi are still a pleasure to listen to, and the same can be said of most of the album. There’s really not too much tedious, over-complex, self-congratulatory stuff (the curse of so many prog rock albums, in my view); it’s largely enjoyable but grown-up rock which still sounds good almost 50 years on.

Sometimes it’s a big mistake to go back, but not this time. This is still a very good album which I can recommend.

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