Prelude – After the Goldrush (1974)

This is the first time this alphabet system backfired a little bit, because the last post was Neil Young's After the Gold Rush and now here's Prelude's album with the same name named after their cover version of Young's song. Doesn't matter that much though, because as an album this is quite far from Neil Young's album. Prelude is a band that's mainly about beautiful vocal harmonies and folk guitars. The result is sometimes a bit cheesy, but it's by far not as cheesy as it could be. Some of the songs are actually quite enjoyable. This album like so many others ended up in my record collection from my grandmother's house from where I got quite a few a vinyl albums that used to belong to my grandmother or to one of my uncles. There were quite a few questionable albums among those, but this album is actually quite good.



The album starts with a beautiful a cappella version of Neil Young's great song After the Gold Rush. It, by no means, matches in greatness with Young's masterpiece, but at least it's different enough to make the version an interesting curiosity. I guess it was quite common for the time of this album to criticise war with Vietnam war going on. To Hell With War is a beautiful folk ballad with excellent picked acoustic guitars and country-influenced steel guitars. Lady from the Small Town sounds a lot like some Joni Mitchell songs. Rufus has almost as great guitar picking scenes as the Simon & Garfunkel songs. Open Book actually has a lot more instrumentation and it resembles some Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young songs. Hotel Room continues with this kind of sound and I'm also reminded of artists such as Cat Stevens. Fly sounds like some of the greatest songs in Hair the musical.

I'm not exactly sure if this album is a compilation or a real album. There's a different kind of version of this on Spotify with different album covers and all. I have a feeling like this would be just another greatest hits album, but it doesn't really matter as I don't know any other albums by this band and I do enjoy this music quite a lot. It definitely has a unified sound, so it could well be just an album as well. Who knows? The album cover would suggest that it's a compilation, because the design is so cheap.

On the video this band looks quite humorous with their very 70's style outfits and country music style attitude. Here's a video of the title track. The vocals are quite amazingly sung considering that this is a live performance. Such great singers.

I don't really know that much about this band to begin with, but it's a UK band that apparently drew most of their influences from US folk and country music. I do like this sound even if it is a bit cheesy here and there. It sounds like a band that i could listen to a bit more in the future. It's good to have this blog project because otherwise I don't know if I would've really listened to this album to realise its strengths.

Listen to the album on Spotify.