Not your usual Eurotrash thrash!
D. G. Luttrell | Colorado | 04/01/2007
(4 out of 5 stars)
"I first heared this album in the late 70's at a issue wrap party for an
artist magazine, PlainSpeak, being played through one of those immense,
powerful, ostentatious 1970's stereo's, gosh I loved those days, the
street poets were sitting on the floor in the dining room in a little
circle passing around chocolate liquor, and the Ginzburg had just
arrived, things were "right" in that Denver home, at that time. I was
enchanted by this album, and the S&M cover is just too cool for school,
I had always really been bored to tears by bands such as King Crimson,
Rick Wakefield & ELP, GG and any number of other bands that played with
mind numbing sameness. The Esperanto Rock Orchestra was an antidote to
this little malady. My copy has been from album to tape to CD, and its
about time I bought the "Danse Macabre" on CD. If you like music that
lulls you in to mental shutdown, this is not the CD for you, but if you
like music that stimulates the mind and the brain stem then I suggest
you give this CD a listen, if not purchase it. This CD, "Danse Macabre"
is one of the gold nuggets of the 70's nixon era effort to put the
restless masses to in the audience to sleep, and calm down the more
overactive among us, and you know who you are my darlings, and since we
were a little overachiever-ish, we got bored and went back to something
a little more physically uplifting.
"
Alan Parsons Project forerunner?
Gavin Wilson | 03/13/2007
(3 out of 5 stars)
"
This CD is, by now, very rare. The Japanese pressing is extinct, and there's only a South Korean edition available, which also contains three or four re-works of tracks from the album.
It's fascinating to hear it again, after an interval of perhaps 30 years. I can see why it's not much in demand -- it's very much of the rock-classical fusion era. Side One (of the LP) is very much an orchestral ELP, with a touch of orchestral Caravan thrown in for the few vocal tracks.
Side Two, in retrospect, is much more interesting, because it contains many of the elements that the Alan Parsons Project would use a year later in their debut album, TALES OF MYSTERY AND IMAGINATION: highly visual orchestrations, rhythmic bass-lines, John Miles-like vocal. I'm not aware that they have credited the influence of Esperanto, but it's hard to believe that Alan Parsons and Eric Woolfson had not heard DANSE MACABRE before composing their first album.
So why did Alan Parsons Project make it big, but Esperanto got virtually nowhere? Esperanto even toured -- I saw them at my old school, Oundle -- whereas Alan Parsons Project was not conceived as a gigging concern.
My explanation is that APP had superior marketing. It made maximum use of its connections -- i.e. Alan Parsons engineered DARK SIDE OF THE MOON, and the musicians included John Miles, Pilot and Arthur Brown, each of which would bring in a few more listeners.
Esperanto, on the other hand, made nothing of its connections, or perhaps it had none. I seem to remember the name of Keith Chrismas was bandied about at the time, but I'd never heard of him so it didn't cut much ice with me.
This is definitely worth hearing again if you liked your prog-rock more classical than rock. There are some decent melodies here although, like Gentle Giant, the band don't stick with a riff for very long before getting bored and moving on."
Track Listings (7) - Disc #1