Considering it’s under half an hour long (weird, given the Moody Blues’ fondness for bombast), John Lodge’s second solo album (and his first for 38 years) packs a lot in.
There’s the opener In My Mind, which sounds more like Gilmour’s Floyd than The Endless River did, some retro-rock in the autobiographical Those Days In Birmingham, the jazz ballad Love Passed Me By and a taste of melancholy prog in the title track’s finale.
Chris Spedding drops guitars in, former Moodies Ray Thomas and Mike Pinder guest on the acoustic, Nilsson-esque Simply Magic, and Lodge’s voice morphs into Dylan’s on Lose Your Love.
This leaps all over the place like a wasp in a wormhole, which suggests that Lodge had enough ideas to warrant this rare extra-curricular excursion, even if most of them end up sounding inescapably like his band. He rides its seesaw with surprising vigour./o:p
