The MOODY BLUES: "Timeless Flight" 4CD

Rating: Comp.
Label: Universal 2013
Review by: Urban "Wally" Wallstrom

The Moody Blues - Timeless Flight - 4 CD Anthology. An exhausting career retrospective spanning the years 1967 to 2003. Containing singles, key album tracks, previously unreleased mixes and live favourites. The majority is nontheless already released elsewhere although it does include a couple of rare and unreleased numbers. The whole package does however impress with its 40 page book, unseen photographs, and liner notes by Mark Powell.

My personal knowledge about the utterly moodie brommies? Very limited. Prior to receiving this smashing 4-disc box-set (there's also the 17 disc box set), yours truly had merely been listening to some dusty old compilation record featuring their ten 'best tracks' or whatever. I knew nothing, absolutely nothing about The Moody Blues and their music beyond the standard hits of "Tuesday Afternoon", "Gemini Dream", "The Voice", and not to forget the ultimate tear-jerker, "Nights In White Satin". I really should have continued to play my ten track album though. It's by far their best material and I can't believe that a wimpy number such as, "I'm Just A Singer (In A Rock And Roll Band)", could end up as #4 in their all-time top five as voted by the fans?

They have sold over 50 million albums though, received 18 platinum discs, and surely must be regarded as classic rock? But to be completely honest, their middle-of-the-road, baroque/soft progressive pop has more in common with Chris De Burgh than great all-time U.K. artists such as Pink Floyd, ELO, or The Beatles. The other way around actually as De Burgh's first album did not see the light of day until 1975. But truth be told. I constantly find myself thinking about De Burgh and his ultra soft pop music while listening to the early seventies material. Chris - the massive MB fan/stalker/copy-cat artist?

"Nights In White Satin" - (sadly) heads and shoulders above all their other compositions and it features the classical Neapolitan chord which especially Beethoven used during the Moonlight and Hammerklavier Sonata.
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