Reviewed by James Attlee

Another collaboration from two of music's oddballs - question is, is it any more than a busman's holiday for Bolton's prog rock king Mann and satirical classical acoustic plonker Catley? How seriously would you take an album with track titles like "Terence The Termite Stares Down His Underpants In Growing Amazement"? Answer: it was always an English prog rock trick to make music that ran the risk of being labelled pretentious, then pricking the bubble by giving it jokey names. The album opens with a rocker called "This Is Your Doing" that could be a cut taken from "Eh! Geoff Mann Band", featuring Geoff's distinctive guitar work and Bowiesque vocal. Then it's into instrumental territory. Generally layers on layers of hypnotic riffs are built up to create soundscapes sometimes dominated by classical motifs as in "Over The Edge", sometimes built around Mann's trademark guitar and delay pedal. The latter style provides the backbone for epic concept-track "The River"; occasionally the repetitive riffs have the hypnotic intensity of the serial music of Phillip Glass (not forgetting one man's 'hypnotic' is another man's 'boring'). This could be your soundtrack - depends what movie you're living in.

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