Detailed Review [Paradox - Overall View]

Well, before I had time to share my joy of receiving recently only good promo CDs with you readers (just look at the "Spaced Out" review:) and, as luck would have it, the weak one didn't keep me waiting for it, arrived from "DNA Records" the next day after I wrote the aforementioned review. There are 9 instrumental tracks that relate droningly a long story of Dave Russell's "Paradoxically boring double LP". I was really curious to hear "Paradox" because of some good reviews, but right after listening to the first Paradox album, composed, engineered, produced and performed solely by Dave Russell* (see lower), I understood none of those reviewers told the truth, actually. What is more, they dubbed "Paradox" "excellent CD", "excellently produced from start to finish", "truly a rare thing", etc and drew comparisons of this simplistic music with Hillage-era Gong (that is, the best Gong period of 1973-1975), Steve Hillage himself, David Gilmour of Pink Floyd, Porcupine Tree and Ozric Tentacles. Even in case you've read one of my Key Reviews called Clones, Clowns, Strangetudes, please rest assured that ANY album from the Ozrics discography is an excellent work compared with this one, so I have to repeat my sentence: What a company for Dave Russell! If you've read another Key Review "The Common Lines", then here there is my opinion on the opinions of the reviewers I mean above (I don't name them directly, but they'll learn about this review soon): either they are deliberate leaders of the unconscious yet real and mass process of commercializing the Progressive Rock movement or they aren't just able to think clearly about progressive music at all. So all in all, they told you and me and many our other brothers in 'progressive' reason monstrous lies because this "best selling" (!) album is electronic pop-Rock rather than Progressive, recorded with simplistic computer technologies and having absolutely uninteresting, very simple and actually dead keyboard repeating themes, played by key-mputer, but not by Dave Russell. *Although there is a couple of real musicians mentioned in the booklet as drummers on the first two or three tracks you won't hear live drumming there anyway. So, the only instrument Dave Russell played to the accompaniment of an awfully boring totally electronic phonogram is electric guitar, but exactly because all the themes weren't practically composed here, and Russell isn't that talented as an arranger, his solos recorded over the electronic phonogram are as simple and boring as the phonogram itself. So, I'm not a bit surprised to see such an 'important' note as "best selling album", as it's clear that exactly dead computer pop is currently practically the only music the masses "comprehend" and accordingly love. Producing this kind of music is probably the only way now to get to the "platinum status" and the highest places in modern tops-of-the-pops. On the other hand, paradoxically, at least a couple of pieces from the second Paradox CD, which was composed, arranged and performed by Dave Russell together with other members of a real band and recorded mostly with live instruments, sound like the best Ozric Tentacles tracks they've never recorded. Need I really add anything here? OK, to know my principal attitude to such different things as poor imitation and real clone please go back to read the same Clones, Clowns, Strangetudes Key Review.

VM. December 11, 2000