ALBUM OF THE MONTH: FEB 2002
LANA LANE-PROJECT SHANGRI-LA
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LANA LANE: Project Shangri-La + exclusive bonus track Japanese CD£14.99
The eagerly awaited new studio album. Talk about monumental - this has to be the best yet. It's powerful, as you'd expect, but the seriously heavy rocking, so evident on the "Astrology" albums, has been enhanced, altered - but not by anything physical. You see there's an assured confidence to the performances on this album, one that seems to have at the back of it, some kind of determination to make solid and intricately structured songs work like never before. It's only when you read the sleeve-notes, to see that this album was actually being recorded during the events of Sept 11th 2001, that you suddenly see it all - there's almost a tension to the material, as though the band were trying to deliver something that had as much feeling as you could possibly put into an album like this without it coming out too schmaltzy at one end or simply not producing the results at the other, and in that respect, as in all others, this wins out to perfection. Not as immediate as its predecessor, you really do have to play it first just to get the atmosphere and wallow in the lyrics, while the musicianship is much more textural, still with plenty of thunder, but with more of a flow, a river as opposed to a hurricane, while Lana's vocal is the best I've heard to date with so much feeling and passion in the voice, pure emotion dripping from every note. There are two songs featuring Ring Of Fire's Mark Boals as co-vocalist, while the bonus track exclusive to this CD is a song specially written for Lana Lane by John Wetton, called 'I Believe In You'. Without going into intricate detail, each and every song on the album is a solid, impeccably produced, played and sung gem, including the phenomenal track 'Tears Of Babylon', an emotive tribute to the Sept 11th events, totally capturing a mood of reflection determination and optimism, setting a sight for the future - and the future is very bight indeed. As I said, one monumental album that deserves to be massive.
