Camel
The Snow Goose Re-recording

Camel – Snow Goose Re-Recording – 2015

Adrew Latimer is not as well-known as a David Gilmour or a Steve Hackett or a Steve Howe, but he is nonetheless the guitarist of one of the most important bands in progressive and English rock. Camel, his creation, was born and raised with melodic sap of many flavors, injected not only by Latimer, but also by another lamented musical genius, Peter Bardens.

Towards the end of 1974, the band was preparing their third album, following “Mirage”, which was well-received both at home and abroad. Of that album, the suite "Nimrodel/The Procession/The White Rider", inspired by Tolkien's tales, was particularly appreciated. They decided to prepare a new work entirely inspired by a literary work. The novella “The Snow Goose” was chosen, a story of a hypothetical encounter between a lighthouse keeper and a snow goose, against the backdrop of war. Lyrics for a narration were prepared to be distributed across the various episodes, but as soon as the novella's author, Paul Gallico, learned about the record, he was quite furious for not being consulted and decided to extract some royalties. Latimer would not have it, and thus the record became instrumental and the title was changed to “Music Inspired by The Snow Goose“.

What that record was, in musical terms, we know well: an explosion of melody and symphony, also thanks to the contribution of orchestral parts inserted to give voice to the characters with oboe and clarinet duets. The union between rock and orchestra was certainly one of the best Anglo-Saxon examples in that sense.

In 2013, after a long illness, a form of leukemia that almost took him away, Andy Latimer went back to work and decided to propose a re-recording of the entire album. He called upon the trusted bassist and vocalist Collin Bass, with him for many years already, the keyboardist Guy LeBlanc, and the drummer Denis Clement. He kept all the parts for flute, guitars, and keyboards for himself, leaving only the organ, moog, and piano parts to LeBlanc. He decided not to call any wind instrument players, so the orchestrations of the original are replaced by keyboards and VST, that is, the Virtual Studio Technology by Steinberg, following a strong push toward musical digitization.

With these premises, it seems clear that the primary and fundamental component of Camel's music has disappeared from the record: the soul. That rare, almost unique spirit that Latimer and company have managed to infuse in every single note of the past, even in those few more banal and discussed tracks of their career.

The tracklist is, of course, completely confirmed, but four tracks are presented revisited, with new arrangements and the insertion of brief new parts, these are “Sanctuary”, “Migration”, “Rhayader Alone”, and “Epitaph”. The inserted or renewed parts are quite good, but nothing that would shout a miracle, in some respects just a bit of watered-down broth. Dominating instead are the guitars, beautifully highlighted, and the keyboard parts, very rich as Latimer/LeBlanc often perform duets. The drummer is decent, although Andy Ward's touch was really something else.

Along with the evaporation of the soul, that warm Camel-like flavor, some unique and fundamental characteristics of the original work, such as lightness, airiness, and the broad breath of the textures, are missing, to the advantage of a sort of synthetic nature of the whole, and consequently, a coldness and a sense of detachment that is strongly penalizing.

The record was released in 2015 by the Japanese label Belle, along with the entire live version, in some ways much more enjoyable and satisfying than the studio part.

It is entirely understandable that, given Latimer's conditions, between health issues, age, and various adversities, the imagination, desire, and ability to produce new material on par with the band's great past and the name built over decades, have been lacking. However, operations like this leave a lot of bitter aftertaste, that nasty flavor of “I wish I could, but I can't anymore”. And I say this with infinite suffering, for the amount of love I have poured into Camel's music, but objectively, a record like this, which is listened to with expectation and curiosity and then tossed onto the shelf to gather dust, is not good, no.

The rating I give, three stars out of five, is clearly balanced between the quality of this work and the sumptuousness of the original composition, and it shouldn’t detract from the original concept, for which even five stars are indeed too few.

Sioulette p.a.p.