Pendragon
The Jewel

THE REVIEW

After 20 years, the second album by Pendragon, an English band from Stroud, Gloucestershire, is being republished and remastered. They are fully representative of the movement recognized as progressive rock, ideally continuing the work carried out by great bands of the previous decade (think Genesis above all): compared to their predecessors, the music is less rough, and the more melodic sounds led some to define them as “new romantic”.

Our band frequently crosses paths with more well-known groups like Marillion (they share a manager for the production of this album) and Arena; however, their fortune is less, as they fail to break through and be welcomed into the wide arms of a major label. They invent a label, Toff Records, deciding to do everything on their own. If you love music with omnipresent keyboards and melancholic, dreamy guitars and have grasped the genre, this album is for you. Compared to the original version, this one includes two additional bonus tracks: “Armageddon” and “Insomnia”, which do not add much, overall, to the work. To highlight a song above all, “The Black Knight”, the seventh track, is a nearly ten-minute suite that represents, more than any other, the common style of this and other similar groups: the frequent and sudden rhythm changes, these atmospheres always suspended between dream and reality, between twilight and evening fog, their lyrics like minstrels/storytellers of the 20th century, poised between dreaminess and melancholy.

From the band of that time, only Peter Gee, bassist and second guitar, and Nick Barrett remain, the founder, a survivor of the original lineup, with a superb voice in the high tones but weak for the low ones, and a guitar so good it earned the "best guitarist 2001" award from the British Classic Rock Society.