Search - Shadowfax :: Folksongs for a Nuclear Village

Another nice Shadowfax CD

kireviewer | Sunnyvale, Ca United States | 03/11/2005

(3 out of 5 stars)

"This is Shadowfax's sixth CD. It is the first not on the Windham Hill label. It is 45 minutes long and has the trademark new age sound, very crisp and clean.



The CD starts out rather stale, with nondescript compositions that could have come from any one of the earlier five CD's. It is nice music, but we have already heard it many times before. And, the compositions are not as good as the best of the earlier albums.



Things start to pick up in the second half of the CD. Maybe that is because the tracks were composed by the new members of the group. They seem to breath new life into the group.



This is not a bad CD. It just retreads the music of the ealier works. If it were the only CD by Shadowfax, it would be something special, but the others are better. This probably deserves three and a half stars. The first half is in the 2 to 3 star range, while the end of the CD is 4 stars.



This is the Shadowfax CD that won a Grammy award. But, the Grammys are always several years to decades behind the times. Shadowfax really deserved a Grammy for one of the first 3 CD's for their contribution to a new musical style. Jethro Tull did not get a Grammy until the eighties, and it was for a mediocre album in the wrong category."

Earned them a grammy, for good reason

H3-D Technology | London, UK | 10/03/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"In a few words: New Age world music meets modern dance.



The band wrote these songs for a now obscure dance performance of the same name. Putting their distinctively complex style and typically insane array of ethnic instruments to danceable rhythms made for an album of exotic new age modern dance music unlike anything put out before or after.



Like many of their albums, it has the feeling of a soundtrack to a great fantasy video game you've never played. It actually predates such soundtracks by almost a decade.



They won a grammy for this album when it came out, but it didn't seem to stop Capitol from dropping the artist. Now the album is out of print. Go figure."