Thank for your comment
I hope u listen to Patterson album and then u judge
Steve Hackett played guitar and John Hackett played flute in Patterson album.
I hope is useful:
Roger’s Review
At the end of 2012 Tony Patterson and Brendan Eyre met to discuss a project focussing on their native North East of England. That project became the Northlands album we now have before us. Tony Patterson is the singer with Genesis tribute act Re-Genesis, but thankfully for the most part here he keeps the Garbrielisms at bay and has a dreamy and beguiling voice all his own. The exception is So Long The Day where he sounds more like Mr G than the man himself in places. Brendan Eyre is a well-respected musician in the UK prog community, perhaps best known for his work with Riversea and Nick Magnus, who is one of the long list of guest musicians on this album.
It is always helpful for the reader to have a reviewer make comparisons if he or she has not heard a particular band or album, and a handy if glib example is that from track three onwards Northlands comes over a soundtrack to a dream, a kind of precursor to the more menacing and, yes, nightmarish epic sweeps of Gazpacho’s grandiose constructs. Northlands is The Hobbit to Gazpacho’s Demon’s Lord of the Rings, if you will.
You will note I say “from track three”, and that is because despite playing it many times the lengthy album curtain-raiser Northbound is just not doing anything for me. Any piece of music over ten minutes long has to have something in there that makes the listener want to go back again, be it a repeated refrain, or a commanding theme, or that the lyrics tell an interesting and engaging story, or that the music is constantly developing. It does not have to be complex, for in the progwelt that can be as much for its own sake as anything else in a Dream Theater soulless “look at us, aren’t we clever” fashion.
Unfortunately Northbound has little of the above to commend it. It’s entirely inoffensive, obviously well played, but from a musical perspective it promises much without really ever delivering. A series of tantalising introductions that never quite resolve into anything substantial, Northbound consists of compositional sections containing simple melodies and chord structures in barely changing tempos that meander on pleasantly enough but to little effect. From the section I Recall onwards, a very Genesis-like nostalgic song remembering the dreaming shores, I find myself losing interest. The section that follows, The Crossing, is typical of the whole track in that it takes way too long to go hardly anywhere at all. Again, it is pleasant enough, perhaps too much so, for if you heard it in a shopping mall you wouldn’t be overly surprised. I can only conclude that Northbound is a classic case of a prog track being long for the sake of it. Had it been edited by at least half then the many piano flourishes, occasional guitar interludes and general atmospherics would have worked far better.
The story in the lyrics, of a man returning to his homeland after a long time away, and all the trials and tribulations that entails takes up only a relatively small part of the piece, and could have been developed further. This leaves the instrumental sections to hold my interest on their own merits, which I’m afraid they don’t, for me at least, suffering as they do from their barely changing dynamics. Following Northbound is The Northlands Rhapsody that has more of interest in its less than 150 seconds than much of the preceding 24 minutes. Opening with a languorous flugelhorn followed by flute in the round, a brief sunrise of music heralds what is to come, for the rest of the album is a delightful stroll through melancholy tinged with regret, ending with hope of redemption.
Cinematic vistas created in grand instrumental sweeps give glimpses of sepia-tinged times past, then a river flows as metaphor for a journey through time, and suddenly we arrive in the capital. Anyone who knows Dean Street and has seen it on a rainy day will be transported back to its slightly different beat, all lazily world weary and finger-poppin’ with a touch of the devil-may-care. A Rainy Day On Dean Street is the best song on the album simply because it lifts the album towards a slightly animated version of introspection, and sounds more rounded, human even, as a result. Quite evocative, it has to be said.
It seems to me that the true sound of Patterson & Eyre lay not with the somewhat laboured prog stylings of Northbound, but in a melding of an emotive Blue Nile-styled post-rock infused with a very light-touch jazzy sensibility and the occasional symphonic denouement. This shines through on the simple and rhythmically repetitive but this time effective Legacy, a tune that at a touch under five minutes is exactly as long as it needs to be, no more, no less.
The only track I’m not too enamoured with, post-Northbound is the aforementioned So Long The Day where the gentle atmospherics established throughout the record are somewhat disturbed by a large dose of unnecessarily histrionic geetar squawking from Steve Hackett that is stylistically out of synch with the rest of the album, albeit and perhaps pointedly mixed fairly low in the soundstage. A case of getting a “name” guest in, regardless of whether his contribution really fits the project in hand, methinks.
Northlands plays out on the lovely solo piano piece A Sense Of Place which fades away to the sound of seagulls and a gentle sea tide lapping the beach, as if to underline the essentially English nature of this record.
Definitely an album of two halves, and suffice to say I’ve made a playlist with Northbound at the end where it seems to fit better. When they keep their songs to reasonable lengths Patterson & Eyre show that they are capable of creating some good mood music that goes beyond the morose “woe is me” of so much of modern prog of the heavier kind. Northlands is a decent album , but for me it does not live up to the vaunting praise I have read elsewhere, but you probably guessed that already.
TRACK LISTING
01. Northbound (24:04)
– i Three Rivers
– ii Time & Tide
– iii Homeward Bound
– iv Take The Safe Way
– v I Recall
– vi The Crossing
– vii Three Rivers (Reprise)
02. The Northlands Rhapsody (2:14)
03. A Picture In Time (6:00)
04. And The River Flows (2:55)
05. A Rainy Day On Dean Street (4:37)
06. Legacy (4:42)
07. I Dare To Dream (5:25)
08. So Long The Day (6:30)
09. A Sense Of Place (2:05)
Total Time – 58:53
MUSICIANS
Tony Patterson – Vocals, Keyboards, Flute, Duduk, Programming, Orchestrations & Guitars
Brendan Eyre – Keyboards, Piano, Mandolin & Programming
~ with
Steve Hackett – Guitar (8)
John Hackett – Flute (6)
Nick Magnus – Keyboards, Programming & Effects (vii)
Doug Melbourne – Piano (5)
Nigel Appleton – Drums & Percussion
Tim Esau – Bass
Carrie Melbourne – Vocals & Stick (3)
Adrian Jones – 12-String, Nylon & Lead Guitars
David Clements – Bass
Andy Jongman – Guitar (vi)
Fred Arlington – Northumbrian Pipes, Accordion, Sax & Flugelhorn
