MANFRED MANN'S EARTH BAND: Solar Fire (PROGRESSIVE ROCK): review / opinion to read on Music Waves

A few time after "Messin", Manfred Mann's Earth Band comes back with the release of its first single, 'Joybringer', then with the ambitious "Solar Fire", released less than a year after its predecessor.

If the progressive ambitions of Manfred Mann's Earth Band were beginning to show on 'Messin', this new 37-minute opus is resolutely dressed up in the fashionable attire of 1974. And what better way to start the hostilities than with 'Father of Day, Father of Night', a cover of a 90-second Bob Dylan song extended to almost 10 minutes! This first great mid-tempo fresco started with ethereal female choirs and is literally carried by Manfred Mann's keyboards, offering moreover some very melodious guitar soli and instrumental passages with chromatic arpeggios.

If 'In the beginning' is positioned in a more muscular register, evoking Deep Purple during the "Fireball" period, the eponymous track 'Solar Fire' is the first heady progressive pearl of the album with its rumbling bass, odd rhythmic, female voices and cosmic keyboards a la Eloy.

And to stay in the "galactic" register, Manfred Mann's Earth Band closes the album with three tracks inspired by a work of a certain Gustav Holst (Planet's Suite), but for which the band couldn't get the adaptation rights. However, Manfred Mann's Earth Band wrote their own score, starting with an instrumental that starts with an odd rhythm and then turns into a frantic cavalcade led by a guitar/keyboards dialogue ('Saturn ...'). Then, 'Earth, The Circle' will unfold two very different universes, with a first part that is once again completely instrumental, Mike Rogers' guitar tearing up the ears, while the second part welcomes a bit of vocals, before letting the instruments finish a coda ad libitum.

If the quality of an album could be judged by the irrepressible desire to start listening to it again as soon as the last notes of music have faded away, then "Solar Fire" would undoubtedly earn its place as a major work. This subjective impression alone is confirmed here by a great quality of composition and arrangement, Manfred Mann's Earth Band managing to transcend each track, including what sounds like an improvisation presented as a joke ('Pluto the Dog'). The spirit of the great progressive year that was 1974 is well and truly present on "Solar Fire", a true cornerstone of the band's discography. - Official website

MANFRED MANN'S EARTH BAND

SOLAR FIRE

AUTRE LABEL

PROGRESSIVE ROCK